Call for papers, Special Issue on Innovative Frontiers in Automated Software Engineering

Aims and Scope

This special issue aims to collect contributions for innovative ideas, visionary perspectives, and critical reflections that can potentially reshape automated software engineering significantly. We seek contributions beyond incremental advances to propose fundamentally new directions or offer insightful analyses of past and current research trajectories.

We invite three types of papers:

Innovative, groundbreaking new ideas supported by promising initial results, such as

Exciting new directions in early stages of research, supported by initial evidence.

Startling new results that come in conflict with established results or beliefs, supporting a call for fundamentally new research directions.

Visions of the future, such as:

Bold visions of new directions that may not yet be supported by solid results but rather by a strong and well-motivated scientific intuition.

Examples include unusual synergies with other disciplines, or the importance of software engineering in problems whose software engineering aspects have not been studied earlier.

Summaries of highly innovative research ideas recently awarded as grants.

Reflections on the past, such as:

Bold revisits of current research directions that may be somehow misguided.

Thoughtful observations coalescing the most important ideas since the inception of the field of software engineering, where they have led us so far, where past ideas have turned out to be right or wrong.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Radical approaches to automating software engineering tasks supported by preliminary evidence

Novel applications of automation in software engineering contexts are traditionally considered unsuitable

Bold predictions about transformative directions in automated software engineering

The untapped potential of automation in emergent software domains and paradigms

Novel theoretical frameworks for rethinking fundamental aspects of automated software development

Reassessments of foundational assumptions in automated software engineering

Examination of ethical implications and unintended consequences in the evolution of automated software engineering

Reimagining correctness and verification in an era of AI-generated software

Novel approaches to handling uncertainty and ambiguity in automated software engineering

Transformative applications of large language models beyond current paradigms

Radical new perspectives on software composition and integration

Innovative socio-technical approaches that reconsider the relationship between automation and human developers

Disruptive ideas for automated testing, verification, and validation that break from established paradigms