Context

The International Systems and Software Product Lines Conference (SPLC) is the leading conference on the variability and configuration of hardware and software systems. Researchers, practitioners, and educators present and discuss the most recent research breakthroughs, ideas, trends, experiences, challenges, and solutions to advance the state-of-the-art. SPLC is ranked as a top conference, and for this 28th edition, we strive to continue the success of previous years by welcoming high-quality submissions for the research track with a special emphasis on the theme of ‘Management of Quality in Software Product Lines’.

This theme acknowledges the importance of managing the quality of software product lines and of the methods and techniques defined to measure and reason about quality, including the modeling of non-functional requirements and how they are related to variability models, the association of quality measures with either features or configurations of software product lines, the quality-driven analysis of configuration spaces, the definition of metrics to measure the quality of selected samples for testing and the definition of prediction models for non-functional properties. This theme completes the topics of the conference (see below), and we continue welcoming submissions in numerous closely related areas, such as configurable systems, product configuration, and software variability.

Similar to past years, we will award the best research paper and the best student research paper. We are negotiating an open special issue with a top-tier journal. Authors will be invited to submit enhanced versions of their work to the special issue. Details of the call will be published on this website.

Topics

The following is a list of topics of interest to SPLC, but we also invite submissions to related topics, i.e., this list is by no means exhaustive. Feel free to ask the track chairs if in doubt (see below).

AI: genetic algorithms, neural networks, and machine learning for product lines
Architecture, design, and visualization of product lines
Dynamic software product lines, reconfigurable systems, (self-)adaptive systems
Evolution, maintenance, and continuous integration for product lines (e.g., DevOps)
Formal methods and SPL verification techniques (e.g., program analysis, model checking)
Green and sustainable technologies for variation
Human, organizational, and social aspects of product lines (e.g., BPM, collaborative modeling and development, cooperative configuration processes, economics, program comprehension)
Language product lines and domain-specific and programming languages for product lines
Multi-product lines, program families, product lines of product lines, software ecosystems
Non-functional properties and quality management: modeling, analysis, and optimization (e.g., performance, energy), quality-aware analysis, quality-driven configuration
Reverse engineering, variability mining, and refactoring (e.g., migration from clone-and-own)
Recommender systems for configurators and feature models (e.g., CSP/SAT/SMT solvers)
Specification and modeling of SPL (e.g., domain-specific modeling, model-driven engineering)
Testing product lines (e.g., product sampling, test-case selection and prioritization, mutations)
Variability management and variability modeling (e.g., feature models, decision models)


Submission Guidelines

The research track is open to submissions in two categories:

Full papers describing original results of conceptual, theoretical, empirical, or experimental research. The papers in this category must rely on theoretical or empirical evaluation.
Short papers describing emerging ideas or outstanding challenges along with possible approaches for resolving them.

The page limit is 10 pages of content (+ 2 pages for references) for full papers and 5 pages of content (+ 2 pages for references) for short papers. Each submission will be carefully reviewed by at least three members of the research track program committee.

Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of the following criteria:

Originality (including an appropriate comparison to related work)
The importance of contribution (including potential applicability of the results to practice/industry)
Soundness (including appropriate evidence for the main claims, typically from a quantitative and/or qualitative evaluation)
Transparency (methodological steps are described in sufficient detail, artifacts are made available, or a justification is included as to why they are not made available)
presentation quality


Submission link

Submissions need to be sent using EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=splc2024 (Research Track)


Doubled-Blind Review Process

In order to ensure the fairness of the reviewing process, the SPLC 2024 Research Track will follow a double-blind review process. The identity of the authors will not be known to the program committee at any time during the process. The papers submitted must not reveal the authors’ identities in any way.

Authors should leave out author names and affiliations from the body of their submission.
Authors should ensure that any citation to related work by themselves is written in the third person, that is, “the prior work of XYZ” instead of “our prior work”.
Authors should avoid providing URLs to author-revealing sites (tools, data sets). The paper can mention the existence of such sites, but visiting such sites should be optional to conduct the review.
Authors should anonymize author-revealing company names yet can provide general characteristics of the organizations involved needed to understand the context of the paper.

Authors who have further questions on the double-blind reviewing are encouraged to contact the Program Chairs by email. Papers that do not comply with the double-blind review process will be desk-rejected.


Paper Formatting Instructions

The SPLC proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

Submissions must adhere to the latest ACM Master Article Template:
https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template

Latex users should use the “sigconf” option, so they are recommended to use the template found in “sample-sigconf.tex”. In this way, the following latex code can be placed at the start of the latex document to create a double-column layout:

\documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart}

\acmConference[SPLC’24]{28th ACM International Systems and Software Product Lines Conference}{ September 2-6, 2024}{Luxembourg}


Submission Policies

Papers submitted for consideration to SPLC must not have been already published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere during the reviewing period. Specifically, authors are required to adhere to the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the ACM Policy on Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submissions.

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start, and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of the published authors. ACM is committed to improving author discoverability, ensuring proper attribution, and contributing to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.


Artifact Evaluation

Authors of accepted and conditionally accepted research papers are invited to submit the artifacts associated with the paper for evaluation.

According to ACM’s “Result and Artifact Review and Badging” policy, an “artifact” is “a digital object that was either created by the authors to be used as part of the study or generated by the experiment itself [… which can include] software systems, scripts used to run experiments, input datasets, raw data collected in the experiment, or scripts used to analyze results.”

To submit an artifact, you should submit via EasyChair (select the Research Artifacts track) a PDF file containing:

a stable URL (or DOI) to the artifacts – the page must include the steps or general instructions to execute/analyze the artifact; and
the paper as an appendix.

Each artifact submission will be reviewed by at least two reviewers. At this stage, we do not require the anonymization of the artifact’s authors. The Artifact Evaluation PC does not overlap with the Research Track PC. The acceptance of artifacts related to conditionally accepted papers is subject to the acceptance of the corresponding papers.

Accepted artifacts will receive one of the following badges on the first page of the paper, table of contents, and in the ACM Digital Library:

Artifacts Evaluated – This badge is applied to papers whose associated artifacts have successfully completed an independent audit. Artifacts need not be made publicly available to be considered for this badge. However, they do need to be made available to reviewers. Two levels are distinguished, only one of which should be applied in any instance:
Functional – The artifacts associated with the research are found to be documented, consistent, complete, exercisable, and include appropriate evidence of verification and validation.
Reusable – The artifacts associated with the paper are of a quality that significantly exceeds minimal functionality. That is, they have all the qualities of the Artifacts Evaluated – Functional level, but, in addition, they are very
carefully documented and well-structured to the extent that reuse and repurposing are facilitated. In particular, norms and standards of the research community for artifacts of this type are strictly adhered to.
Artifacts Available – This badge is applied to papers in which associated artifacts have been made permanently available for retrieval. Author-created artifacts relevant to this paper have been placed on a publically accessible archival repository. A DOI or link to
this repository along with a unique identifier for the object is provided.

Each accepted research paper associated with an accepted artifact must provide a link to the artifact in the camera-ready version of the paper. The authors must ensure that the artifacts are available from a stable URL or DOI. Please note that these badges exclude proprietary data or tools.


Important Dates (AoE time)

Abstract submission: April 11th, 2024 (23h59, AoE)
Paper submission: April 18th, 2024 (23h59, AoE)
Notification: May 30th, 2024
Artifact submission: June 6, 2024 (23h59, AoE)
Artifact notification: June 17, 2024
Camera-ready paper: June 20, 2024 (23h59, AoE)
Conference: September 2nd to 6th, 2024