Software pervades our lives. Consequently, software engineering has a duty to society beyond the narrow technical goals of creating systems that meet their cost, schedule, and quality goals.
We’re looking for insightful, thought-provoking submissions that address software engineering’s role in society. Specifically, we seek contributions that highlight how software engineering can address the opportunities and challenges posed by the rapidly accelerating pace of technological advances impacting the economic, political, environmental, social, and technical aspects of society.
This theme issue also aims to discuss new trends in software development, in which software is only a part of a larger system, and its development is tackled within specific disciplines with limited (or no) involvement of software experts. The goal is to investigate the reasons for this trend, analyze possible novel contributions from the software engineering community, and identify novel research challenges that these disciplines pose to software engineering methodologies and practices.
We’re especially interested in submissions that address practitioners’ needs. So, we strongly encourage submissions describing research performed in collaboration with practitioners or members of governmental or nongovernmental organizations.
In particular, we solicit
- innovative, inspiring research with a clear impact on software engineering challenges, directions, methods, and tools;
- engagement with a broad spectrum of disciplines including, but not limited to, health; the physical sciences; the environmental sciences; the social sciences; management; economics; computing and engineering; security, safety, and privacy; law enforcement; engineering emerging cyber-physical systems; the arts and crafts; and interdisciplinary research;
- work emerging from research partnerships with communities, nongovernmental organizations, cultural institutions, and the public and private sectors;
- research reflections on the long-term implications of digital-technology interventions on all aspects of society;
- research toward new development models, tools, and methods for specific application environments; and
- research findings supported by empirical studies and experimentation.