Best Practices, Challenges and Opportunities in Software Engineering

Dear Colleagues,

Software is pervasive in human society, having grown at an accelerated rate. The capabilities of software have transformed all aspects of our lives, including governance, education, industries, economics, politics, social relations, and cultural development. With the advances in hardware acceleration, communication technologies, and computing models, new types of services and applications delivered by software are emerging at a rapid pace. For example, a cloud-native service can achieve failover in a virtual node in mere minutes, while it takes hours for a node to be replaced within traditional in-house data centers. One challenge in this field is posed by the need to catch up with the development of software lifecycle to address designs, architectures, operations,  technical debts, costs, and emerging domains. On the other hand, the massive expansion of software has begun to positively influence ethics and social relations, demonstrating the benefits of software for human society. This Special Issue calls for papers presenting technological innovations, novel research outcomes, and inspiring applications dedicated to best practices, challenges, and opportunities in the field of software engineering. We invite papers covering the following aspects of software engineering, among other relevant topics:

• Ethics and social studies for software engineering ;
• Software design methods and best practices;
• Requirement engineering;
• Software testing for distributed computing, cloud services;
• Software code analysis for emerging domains such IoT, edge computing, block chain, autonomous driving;
• Software repository mining;
• Software architecture for large-scale software systems;
• Software engineering for machine learning;
• Machine learning for software engineering;
• Software quality of emerging attributes, including trustworthiness, transparency, explainability, observability, audibility, sustainability;
• Software process for emerging domains and applications;
• Software metrics and measurement for emerging attributes;
• Software engineering for data science and engineering;
• Tools, methods, and models for software development;
• CI/CD and DevOps for specific aspects such as security, machine learning, XAI.

Dr. Yan Liu
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Computers is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• software engineering
• large scale software systems
• cloud computing
• distributed computing
• software services
• software ethics
• software social impact
• sustainability
• responsible software development