Special Issue on “IT Quality Challenges in a Digital Society”

Motivation

A digital society is a society in which digital technologies become the building blocks to effectively respond to different individual, community and societal challenges. Societal-scale software systems incorporate AI, include people as active players, create new information flows and reshape societal knowledge, forming entirely new environments and cities in which digital technologies are used to support and enhance our daily work, relationships, education, entertainment, industry, commerce, and even politics. Thus, to create and sustain our digital society, quality is key.

Despite all its current achievements, potential benefits and future promises, there are numerous challenges to creating and sustaining a digital society. For example, socio-technical systems provide direct connections to billions of people daily around the world, which dramatically increases the potential scale for social manipulation. The adoption of new, mostly disruptive, technologies such as quantum computing or AI-based decision-making systems can bring along significant advances, but they also entail new problems since there is little understanding of how the resulting systems will behave. We also have to understand how the scale and speed of these changes impact consumers, users, citizens and workers, as well as how they affect social and private life, education, science, government, democracy and business.

We invite to this special issue high-quality contributions with innovative and significant findings and experiences in the field of software quality, including methods and techniques employed by researchers and practitioners for identifying, managing, controlling, measuring, and assuring quality issues in the engineering of digital societies. We accept original and previously unpublished papers, unless the new work constitutes a significant expansion of previous work. Those submissions that present extended versions of papers published in conferences require at least 40% original material to be included.

Objective and Topics

This special issue encourages researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and approaches on how to adopt, from a practical point of view, practices, methods, techniques for build sustainable software systems. The topics of interest for the special issue are quality aspects in the following areas:

• Software Sustainability

• Quality Aspects in Software Evolution

• Quality Aspects in Modeling and Low Code Environments

• Quality Aspects in Software Product Management and Requirements Engineering

• Software Verification and Validation

• Process Improvement, Organization, and Governance

• Quality Aspects in Machine Learning, AI and Data Analytics

• Quality Aspects in Digital Twins and Cyber-Physical Systems

• Quality Aspects in Quantum Computing

• Safety, Security, and Privacy

• Software Quality Education and Training in Academia and Industry

Important Dates

• Paper submission: November 20, 2022

• First notification: January 15, 2023

• Revised versions due: February 28, 2023

• Final notification: March 31, 2023

• Manuscript Due: April 30, 2023

• Publication Date: 2023

Submission guidelines

All submissions should follow the Software Quality Journal submission guidelines available at the journal website: https://www.springer.com/journal/11219/submission-guidelines

Guest Editors

For any questions regarding this special issue, please contact the guest editors:

• Antonio Vallecillo, University of Málaga, Spain

• Joost Visser, Leiden University, The Netherlands

• Ricardo Perez-Castillo, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain