From a colleague in the field- Call for Chapter Proposals

Title: Software and Systems Traceability

Proposal Submission Deadline: July 30th , 2010

A book edited by: Andrea Zisman, Jane Cleland-Huang and Olly Gotel to be published by Springer-Verlag

Introduction: Traceability relations are typically created and maintained either through use of a requirements management tool, or else in a spreadsheet or Word document. There are numerous issues that make it difficult to achieve successful traceability in practice.  These issues include social ones related to communication between project stakeholders, as well as technical issues related to physically managing thousands of interrelated and relatively brittle traceability links.  As a result many organizations struggle to implement and maintain traceability relations, even though it is broadly recognized as a critical element of the software development lifecycle.

The traceability research community is actively addressing these issues through exploring topics related to automating the traceability process, developing strategies for cost-effective traceability, supporting the evolution and maintenance of traceability relations, visualizing traceability, and developing traceability practices that apply across a wide range of domains such as product lines, multi-agent systems, safety critical applications, and various regulated industries.

Objectives of the book:

The main purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive reference for traceability research and practice. More specifically, this edited book will provide an introduction to the concepts and theoretical foundations of traceability, and a reference for practitioners, researchers, and students about what has already been achieved in the area of software traceability. The book will address a critical component of software engineering that has previously only been addressed as research papers in conference proceedings, journals, or individual book chapters.

The publication will provide a detailed overview of industrial practices, general challenges, and cutting edge research solutions.  All research solutions included in the volume will be scientifically evaluated and will represent mature research that has either been tested in industry or is at a viable point to support technology transfer.

This differs from current isolated book chapters on traceability, which tend to focus on limited methods currently supported by industrial tools.  It also differs from research oriented journals which include papers that might describe work that is not yet ready for technology transfer.  This publication is therefore characterized by the maturity of the work.

Target Audience:

Prospective readers include research students studying traceability related topics, process improvement officers across a wide variety of industries, and Undergraduate and Master students in advanced software engineering classes.  It should be noted that people from several different software engineering areas are interested in traceability and could be expected to show interest in this book.

The availability of a book describing existing approaches for traceability in an easy, coherent, and comprehensive way will assist students, researchers, and practitioners to better understand the area and to identify approaches that can be applied in different situations.

Book Format:

The book will be focused around three different case studies.  Authors may choose which of these case studies are appropriate for their particular topic, and may choose to include one, two, or three of the provided case studies.

The book will include an introductory section including a chapter detailing each of the case studies.  Each chapter will follow a prescribed format including (i) Introduction, (ii) Related Work, (iii) The technique, (iv) Open Issues, (v) Evaluation, and (vi) Conclusions and future work.

Topics:

Chapter topics will include, but are not limited to the following:

Introduction to traceability

Case studies to illustrate the material covered in the book

Traceability project planning and management

Techniques for capturing traceability relations

Automated traceability relation generation methods

Traceability relation evolution and maintenance

Traceability relation assessment and evaluation

Traceability relation configuration

Traceability relation visualization

Tracing quality attributes

Value-based traceability

Tracing in very large software systems

Tracing across the lifecycle

Traceability standards

Tracing in specific domains

Impact analysis of traceability

Traceability cost-benefit

Submission Procedure:

You are invited to submit a chapter proposal by the 30th  of July, 2010.

Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by 1st of September, 2010 about the status of their proposals and will be sent chapter organizational guidelines and case study materials. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by 30th of October 2010. All submitted chapters will be peer-reviewed.

Important Dates:

30th July 2010 –  Submission of chapter proposals by invited authors 1st September 2010 –  Initial notification of chapter proposals 1st September 2010 – Chapter guidelines and case study materials sent to authors of accepted proposals 30th October 2010 – Submission of chapters by authors 18th December 2010 – Reviewers comments sent to authors 25th January 2011 – Submission of second version of chapters by authors 20th February 2011 –  Notification to authors 10th March 2011 – Submission of camera ready by authors

Guidelines for Chapter Proposals:

Chapter proposals should be very brief (1 page at most). We are not expecting polished abstracts at this time.  Instead, the proposal should provide a draft description of the chapter and its objectives.  Once all chapter proposals are received we will look for overlap and where necessary suggest collaborations and/or alternate chapter ideas.  Please feel free to outline more than one possible chapter.  You could for example propose three different chapters and mark your preferences for each one.  The editors will then work with each potential author to optimize individuals first choices while ensuring broad coverage of traceability topics.

Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically (Word document) to:

Andrea (a.zisman@soi.city.ac.uk), Jane (jhuang@cs.depaul.edu), and Olly (olly@gotel.net).