For the research track, we invite high quality submissions describing original and unpublished results of in all areas related to software product line engineering.

Topics

The topics include but are not limited to:

• Business, organizational, and process issues
• Product line evolution and life-cycle
• Validation and verification
• Non-functional considerations
• Multi product lines, product lines of product lines
• Open source systems
• Software ecosystems and supply chains
• Incremental development of product lines
• Non-traditional applications of product line concepts

We invite the following two categories of contributions:

• Full papers describing original results of conceptual, theoretical, empirical, and experimental research. The papers in this category must rely on theoretical and/or empirical evaluation.
• Short papers describing early returns on research with limited theoretical or experimental validation, or other shorter research topics of interest

Paper Format

Page limit is 10 pages for full papers and 5 pages for short papers. Submissions should follow the ACM SIGS proceedings format and will be reviewed by at least three members of the SPLC 2015 Research Track program committee.

Paper Submission

SPLC 2015 Easychair submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=splc15

Important Dates

Abstracts: March 27, 2015 April 10, 2015 (extended)
Full papers: April 3, 2015 April 17, 2015 (extended)
Notifications: May 21, 2015 June 4, 2015 (extended)
SPLC 2015: July 20-24, 2015
Further enquiries can be made to the Research Track chairs: research-chairs@splc2015.net

Industrial participation is and has always been a strong aspect of SPLC and the upcoming event will be no exception to this tradition. So we invite your contributions to discuss challenges, innovations and solutions to concrete industrial applications of software product line engineering tools and methodologies.

For more than a decade, organizations have been taking advantage of software product line practices to achieve business advantages in time to market, cost, quality, and agility. These organizations have encountered a wide range of challenges, successes, and adaptations in their software product line experience. We are seeking contributions from industry that share those challenges, successes, and adaptations during all stages of software product line maturity-ranging from adoption to evolution.

The topics include but are not limited to:

• Introducing PLE to an organization
• Business ecosystems around product line engineering
• Process issues, e.g. combining PLE with agile processes
• Scoping of product/solution portfolios and assets
• Product line architectures, design, validation and assessment
• Variability implementation techniques
• Variability management in and between all stages of the life-cycle
• Guidance and governance product line engineering tools and methods
• Product line testing
• Version and configuration management
• Patterns and Architectures for public/private cloud in software product lines
• Disruptive Innovations and its effects on software product line

We invite the following two categories of contributions:

• Full papers reporting experience from industrial applications and projects. The papers in this category must provide sufficient context of the problems identified or addressed, describe clear requirements and/or experience in solving them, provide an assessment of benefits and drawbacks or other lessons learned, and explain why the contribution is innovative or valuable for others.
• Short papers describing, from an industrial perspective, early returns on new industry product line applications and projects, or other shorter industry topics of interest

Page limit is 10 pages for full papers and 5 pages for short papers. Submissions should follow the ACM SIGS proceedings format and will be reviewed by at least three members of the SPLC 2015 Industry Track program committee.

SPLC 2015 Easychair submission link:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=splc15

Important Dates

Abstracts: March 27, 2015 April 10, 2015 (extended)
Full papers: April 3, 2015 April 17, 2015 (extended)
Notifications: May 21, 2015 June 4, 2015 (extended)
SPLC 2015: July 20-24, 2015
Further enquiries can be made to the Industry Track chairs: industry-chairs@splc2015.net

Goals

The goal of the SPLC Vision Track 2015 is to look to the future of software and system product lines, discussing trends, emerging directions, and synergies with fields outside traditional software and system product line communities. The Vision Track encourages discussion of radical new directions and potentially disruptive software and system engineering innovations. To support that goal, the Vision Track will publish three kinds of papers:

1. Reaching out principles and practices from software product lines to other fields, such as:
   • Core assets + variability = the fabric of self-adaptive systems
   • Runtime variability as a first-class citizen to manage uncertainty
   • Variant binding and binding time as key principles to manage the blurring boundaries between development time and run time
   • Strategic reuse applied to fields such as mobile systems, cloud, big data, and Web 2.0
   • Software product line principles and practices as development paradigm for systems of systems, cyber physical systems, multi-agent systems, smart ecosystems, IoT, etc.
2. Uptake of principles from other fields to software product lines, such as:
   • Self-adaptation to push product configuration/adaptation into the runtime
   • Context-awareness to adapt variant binding based on the concrete context of use
   • Models at runtime to reason about late variant binding
   • Self-organization as a principle to enable self-configuration
   • Meta-variability to cope with software product line evolution
3. Reflections on the past and visions for the future:
   • Papers that call existing views into questions and suggest to change perspectives
   • Results that disregard established results and call for fundamentally new directions
   • Interdisciplinary efforts with potential unusual synergies
   • Software ecosystems
   • Dynamic software product lines: hype or the future?

Vision Track submissions must clearly motivate and illustrate a rationale for changing current practice and/or research in software product lines engineering or related fields. We solicit long papers (up to 10 pages) and short papers (up to 5 pages). Long papers for the Vision Track require supporting evidence for the claims made; short papers do not require evaluation results but can optionally be presented.

Scope

The SPLC Vision Track provides a forum for innovative, thought-provoking directions in software and system product lines aiming to accelerate the exposure of the community to promising and potentially inspiring research and engineering efforts. Contributions should provide novel, soundly motivated research and engineering directions and emerging results.

Out of scope

A Vision Track submission should not be a position statement or an SPLC research submission that lacks sufficient evaluation. Vision Track papers are fundamentally different in nature, focusing on future trends and directions.

Evaluation

All papers will be evaluated in terms of the following criteria.

• Value: the problem is worth exploring;
• Impact: the potential for disruption of current practice;
• Originality: of the paper's insight;
• Synergy: the paper appropriately connects a set of things that were previously treated separately;
• Validity: soundness of the rationale;
• Scholarship: appropriate consideration of relevant literature;
• Quality: overall paper quality;
• Surprise: startling and unexpected findings.

How to submit

In the submission form, authors must explicitly categorize their papers into one of the following categories:

• Reaching out principles from software product lines to other fields;
• Uptake of principles from other fields to software product lines;
• Reflections on the past and visions for the future.

A Vision Track submission must conform to the ACM SIGS proceedings format and must not exceed 10 pages for long papers and 5 pages for short papers, including text, references and figures. Submissions will be reviewed by at least three members of the SPLC 2015 Vision Track program committee. Papers must be submitted electronically via easychair by the submission deadline. Submissions that do not comply with the instructions and size limits may be rejected without review.

Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=splc15 - select Vision Papers

At least one author of accepted papers will present the work at the conference.

Important Dates

Abstracts: March 27, 2015 April 10, 2015 (extended)
Full papers: April 3, 2015 April 17, 2015 (extended)
Notifications: May 21, 2015 June 4, 2015 (extended)
SPLC 2015: July 20-24, 2015
Further enquiries can be made to the Vision Track chairs: vision-chairs@splc2015.net

While SPLC has always targeted systems as well as software product line engineering, SPLC 2015 introduces a new track explicitly aimed at product lines residing primarily in the systems engineering realm.

The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) defines SE as an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems. It concerns operations, cost and schedule, performance, training and support, test, technical considerations.

This track solicits papers, either research-oriented or industry-oriented, that are explicitly aimed at product lines residing primarily in the Systems Engineering realm. Specifically, this track is for papers addressing product line engineering where the focus extends beyond software and into other lifecycle phases (design, testing, mechanical, electrical, operations, portfolio management, manufacturing, etc.) and/or concerns across the whole organization. Industry or research papers focusing primarily on software product lines should be submitted to the standard industry and research tracks.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Industrial experiences in systems-engineering-centered product lines
• PLE and product/portfolio management
• PLE and manufacturing
• PLE and operations
• PLE-based approaches to complexity management
• PLE and sales and marketing
• Variation management among all stages of the lifecycle
• PLE and the “V” model for engineering
• PLE’s role in and relationship to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
• PLE’s role in and relationship to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
• PLE and model-based development
• Tooling for PLE systems engineering cross-lifecycle solutions

We invite the following contributions:

• Full papers (up to 10 pages) describing original results that address topics relevant to the track. Papers in this category must provide sufficient context of the problems identified or addressed, describe clear requirements and/or experience in solving them, provide an assessment of benefits and drawbacks or other lessons learned, and explain why the contribution is innovative or valuable for others.
• Short papers (up to 5 pages) describing early returns on topics relevant to the track, or other shorter system engineering topics of interest.

Submissions should follow the ACM SIGS proceedings format and will be reviewed by at least three members of the SPLC 2015 Systems Engineering Track program committee.

SPLC 2015 Easychair submission link:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=splc15

Important Dates

Abstracts: March 27, 2015 April 10, 2015 (extended)
Full papers: April 3, 2015 April 17, 2015 (extended)
Notifications: May 21, 2015 June 4, 2015 (extended)
SPLC 2015: July 20-24, 2015

The Software Product Line Conference (SPLC) is the premier forum for practitioners, researchers and educators to present and discuss the most recent ideas, innovations, trends, experiences, and concerns in the area of software product lines, software product family engineering and, more in general, systems family engineering. SPLC 2015 will be the 19th meeting of the product line community and will be held in Tennessee, USA, 20 to 24 July.

We propose you to collaborate in this forum by submitting proposals for one or two day’s interactive and collaborative workshops in the field of software product lines. Those workshops should be targeting innovative, emerging and interesting research areas within the context of software product lines. The aim of SPLC workshops should be to incentive the collaboration in between multiple software product line researchers and practitioners interested in specific areas rather than mini-conferences.

Workshops usually take place on the first and second day of the conference, thus, 20th and 21st July’15. SPLC workshop papers are published in volume 2 of the SPLC conference proceedings published by ACM. Moreover, a one-page summary of each accepted workshop will be published in volume 1.

Workshop proposals should be authored by at least two organizers, preferably from different institutions, and they should contain the following three sections:

Tutorials provide a valuable opportunity for conference participants to expand their product line knowledge and skills. Tutorials may focus on introductory product line topics, such as how to introduce a product line approach into an organization, or on more advanced applied topics, such as industrial product line engineering practices.

This year, we would like to place special emphasis on the following areas:

1. The practical adoption of SPL skills, tools, and processes in industry;
2. In-depth discussions of advanced SPLE topics (e.g., agile practices, ecosystem modeling, application platforms);
3. SPL in the context of The Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems.

Tutorials will be held during the conference week in full-day or half-day sessions. A tutorial proposal consists of two pages describing the topic, the plan for conducting the tutorial, and the backgrounds of the presenters and the tutorial.

• The Topic section should include the title, goals, and intended audience of the tutorial (practical vs. academic; beginners vs. advances). The topic should be described in detail, stressing its importance and timeliness.
• The Plan section should include:
  • A preliminary schedule of events including estimated times and length of the tutorial (half-day/full-day);
  • A detailed description of what the tutorial will cover;
  • A justification of the tutorial for SPLC2015;
  • An explanation of how the tutorial will be conducted;
  • Sample material or notes, if the topic is being proposed for the first time.
• The Presenters' Backgrounds section should include relevant biographical information and summaries of the presenters' technical presentation and tutorial experience.
• The Tutorial Background section should include a description of where and when the tutorial has been offered previously and any evaluations that were done.

A one-page description of all accepted tutorials will be published in the conference proceedings.

SPLC 2015 Easychair submission link:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=splc15

Tutorial Chairs

James H. Hill, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, USA – hillj@cs.iupui.edu

Important Dates

Abstracts: March 27, 2015 April 10, 2015 (extended)
Full papers: April 3, 2015 April 17, 2015 (extended)
Notifications: May 21, 2015 June 4, 2015 (extended)
SPLC 2015: July 20-24, 2015

The SPLC Doctoral Symposium aims to provide a supportive environment that enables doctoral students to get feedback on and improve their research. Students will have the opportunity to discuss their work with experienced members of the community. Thus, the symposium offers a unique opportunity to gather valuable expert feedback and to get into contact with other students in the same field. The overall aim of the symposium is to improve the quality of doctoral theses in the area of software product lines. The event is dedicated to Ph.D. candidates (2nd year or later) with initial results that are not yet mature enough for a full conference paper. The SPLC doctoral symposium covers the same research topics as the main conference.

Part I: Research Plan

To participate, students should prepare a research plan answering the following questions:

• What is the problem you intend to investigate?
• Why is the work important?
• How are you going to do the work?
• When what has already been done and what remains to be done?

In detail, the following structure and content is strongly recommended:

Front matter
Title, your name, email address, personal website, abstract

Introduction and Motivation
Introduction (area of study); description of the problem (that you tackle); what the literature says about this problem (where does existing work fail?); how you (plan to) tackle this problem; how you (plan to) implement your solution/envisioned result; how you (plan to) validate your solution.

Research Issues, Objectives, and Questions (and Hypotheses)
The main research issues/objectives/questions/hypotheses clearly stated.

Research Methodology and Research Design
The research method(s) you are using or plan to use, with appropriate references.
The research design: how you concretely plan to apply the method(s), e.g., data collection and analysis, set-up for measurements/experiments, case studies, etc.
How do you plan to evaluate your results? Threats to validity?

Preliminary key results or contributions
Outline/Overview of the proposed solution, results of preliminary data analysis, etc.
An example to explain how the solution would work (this is very important!).
What is expected to be the main result or contribution?

Work plan
Outline of the structure of your thesis.
Work accomplished so far and work remaining to be done.
Publication plan and other tasks planned.
A detailed work plan for the next 6-12 months.

Key references
The idea of the research plan is to provide clear material to be useful as a basis for guidance and discussion. Therefore, students should think about the above points carefully and try to make their ideas as concrete and clear as possible. Students at relatively early stages of their research will certainly have difficulty addressing some of these, but should still attempt to do the best they can. It is strongly recommended that students discuss these points with their supervisors!

Part II: Letter of Recommendation

Ask your supervisor/advisor for a letter of recommendation. It should include your name and an assessment of the current status of your thesis research and an expected date for thesis submission.

Submissions
Submissions should include a research plan (8 pages max. in ACM SIGS proceedings format http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates, tighter style) and a letter of recommendation. All submissions must be in English, in PDF format, and must not contain or cite proprietary or confidential material. The research plan should be submitted via EasyChair (select Doctoral Symposium as submission type). The letter of recommendation should be sent by email to a.gokhale@vanderbilt.edu.

SPLC 2015 Easychair submission link
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=splc15

Important Dates

Abstracts: March 27, 2015 April 10, 2015 (extended)
Full papers: April 3, 2015 April 17, 2015 (extended)
Notifications: May 21, 2015 June 4, 2015 (extended)
SPLC 2015: July 20-24, 2015

Review and Evaluation Criteria
Submissions will be evaluated by at least two reviewers according to relevance, originality and feasibility of the described research. See also the points on the right sketching out the suggested content of the research plan. We recommend to discuss the submission, the letter of recommendation, and the travel with your supervisor early on.

Format
The symposium will be held in conjunction with SPLC 2015. Each participant gets the chance to present his/her work (full presentation or short presentation) and will get feedback from the panelists and the audience. In particular, the presenters will be provided with an opportunity for direct discussions with the reviewers. Students are recommended to prepare particular points they want to get feedback on and/or want to discuss.