Workshop Motivation

The growing need for maintaining and evolving software systems is a major challenge in modern software engineering. Several studies have shown that maintenance tasks are responsible for a substantial cost in the software development process, sometimes reaching 90% of the total cost. The pressure for faster development and releases of new software versions has also increased the interest in software evolution and maintenance throughout the years. Besides, there is an increasing investment in these activities since the advent of execution environments (e.g., Web computing, ubiquitous computing, and cloud computing), development paradigms (e.g., Feature-Oriented Programming, Service-Oriented Architecture, DevOps) and new types of media (e.g., mobile devices, gesture-based interfaces etc.).

In order to perform maintenance and evolution tasks in complex software systems, developers must resort to advanced means for understanding the software artifacts to be modified. Software comprehension, however, is a non-trivial task. In this scenario, software visualization becomes an interesting resource, relying on the use of visual abstractions to facilitate comprehension of software systems under several viewpoints, representing structural, behavioral, and time-based aspects of software. The clear intersection between Software Visualization, Software Evolution, and Software Maintenance led to the creation of an event where researchers can discuss challenges in these fields and work together to overcome them.

The Fifth Workshop on Software Visualization, Maintenance, and Evolution (VEM 2018) aims at bringing together the research communities interested in topics related to Software Visualization, Software Evolution, and Software Maintenance to share and discuss ideas, reflecting on alternatives to perform visualization, evolution, and maintenance of software systems. VEM is also a great opportunity for strengthening research group collaborations, as well as identifying new research opportunities. VEM is co-located with the 9th Brazilian Conference on Software: Theory and Practice (CBSoft 2018).

Important Dates

All dates refer to midnight 23:59:59 AoE.

Paper Submission:	July 02, 2018
Author Notification:	July 23, 2018
Camera-Ready Copies:	July 29, 2018
Workshop Date:	September 19, 2018

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest are related to several research challenges in Software Visualization, Software Evolution, and Software Maintenance. They include, but are not limited to:

Mining software repositories and software analytics
Processes of software visualization, maintenance, and evolution
Metrics and assessment of evolving software
Empirical studies on software visualization, maintenance, and evolution
Software management (risks, economic aspects, configuration management, planning, and estimation)
Visualization, maintenance, and evolution of applications in specific execution environments (e.g., web, cloud, mobile)
Visualization, maintenance, and evolution targeting development paradigms (e.g., feature-oriented, model-driven, test-driven, service-oriented)
Tools and environments for software visualization, maintenance, and evolution
Reverse engineering, reengineering, refactoring, and migration
Computational reflection and metaprogramming applied to maintenance and evolution
Static and dynamic analyses of software
Program comprehension
Visualization, maintenance, and evolution of legacy software systems
Static and dynamic software source code visualization
Visualization of software engineering activities, e.g., requirements engineering, tests, and maintenance
Visualization of workflows, business processes, databases and network flows
3D software visualization
Multidimensional software visualization
Visual analytics applied to software engineering
Plug-ins related to visualization, maintenance, and evolution for integrated development environments
New technologies applied to software visualization
Education on software visualization, maintenance, and evolution

Submission Guidelines

The VEM workshop accepts technical papers (up to 8 pages) written in English or in Portuguese. All papers must be submitted in PDF format and formatted according to the SBC template (available at http://vem2018.github.io/paper_template/template_sbc.rar).

Submitted papers must be unpublished and should not be under review elsewhere. Experimental evaluation of the results is desirable, but it is not a precondition to submit a paper to the workshop. Papers with innovative and promising proposals are welcome. The acceptance of a paper implies that at least one of its authors will register for the workshop and present the paper. The workshop proceedings will be published online available from CBSoft 2018 page.

Papers should be submitted electronically through EasyChair at

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vem2018

Double-Blind Submission

For the first time, VEM 2018 will follow a double-blind review process.

How to prepare the blinded manuscript

First, both author names and affiliations must be omitted from the manuscript. Besides, there are other rules that have to be considered to ensure the manuscript is correctly prepared for double-blind review:

Uses the third person to refer to your own related work.
You should anonymize the reference to your previous work in the submitted manuscript. For example, cite papers published by the authors in the manuscript as follows: "based on the previous work [Anonymous 2018]".
The reference list should be presented as: "Anonymous (2018) Details omitted for double-blind reviewing".
You should not relying on supplementary material. However, whether you need to make available any artifact, please anonymize it and the respective website.