I have the pleasure to be chairing the doctoral symposium at the XP 2017 conference. Please find the call for research proposals below:
Agile software development is a mainstream approach in software engineering. Therefore, software engineering research is and should be involved in understanding and improving agile practices. We can now look back at an impressive amount of work on agile software development, empirical and methodological. Yet, there are still many open questions out there and agile software development has not stood still. Newer practices and approaches need to investigated scientifically. Yet, choosing the right research methods and strategies can be a difficult endeavour.
This doctoral symposium should be a help to PhD students who already or plan to conduct research in the wider area of agile software development. Experienced researchers from the board of advisors will review the research plans from PhD students and give them detailed feedback and guidance. The most promising research plans will be invited to be presented at the symposium where the students can get more direct feedback in the discussion. Furthermore, we will have an interactive session at the doctoral symposium with all present PhD students and advisors to work on their abilities to develop research plans.
Participation in the symposium is being solicited at three levels:
Participants are doctoral students, preferably at a mid-point in their dissertation work (i.e. are at least 12 months from defending their dissertation, but have at least a preliminary research design), who will present their work at the symposium and receive feedback from a dedicated mentor from the board of advisors, the other symposium advisors and other attendees.
Those wishing to be participants are asked to submit a paper (up to 6 pages following the LNBIP template) on their research plan including:
- Title and abstract
- Introduction (motivation, rationale, background) to the research
- Description of issues or points on which the author would like to get the most advice on
- Relevant prior work (foundations, relevant research results, research gap this work tries to fill)
- Research objectives, questions and hypotheses (with rationale)
- Research approach, study design and arrangements
- Data analysis methods and techniques
- Validity threats and their control
- Summary of the current status of the research and planned next steps
Participants in the symposium are required to:
- submit and present a research plan,
- review and comment on up to two other research plans, and
- act as a scribe in one review session.
All papers must be submitted through https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/XP2017 in PDF format. Papers are limited to 6 pages, must be written in English and be formatted according to the LNBIP templates. Papers not following the formatting guidelines will be rejected without review.
Apprentices are also doctoral students, but at an earlier stage in their studies. Apprentices will attend the symposium and are encouraged to ask questions of the presenters, and will benefit from the feedback given to other students.
Observers are any other members of the agile software engineering research community who would like to attend the symposium. NOTE: Any observer or symposium advisor who is serving as a dissertation advisor to one of the participants is "kindly requested" to not speaking during the presentation and discussion of their student's work.
Important Dates
16th January 2017 23rd January 2017 : Deadline for research plan submission
15th February 2017: Notification of Acceptance
28th February 2017: Camera-Ready Copy Due
22nd May 2017: Symposium
26th May 2017: Session notes sent to participants
For further information, please, send a message to stefan [dot] wagner [at] informatik [dot] uni-stuttgart [dot] de , Title´s tag: [XP DS].
Board of Advisors:
Stefan Wagner, University of Stuttgart (chair)
Daniel Méndez Fernández, TU Munich
Darja Smite, Blekinge Institute of Technology
Davide Taibi, Free University of Bolzano/Bozen
Laurie Williams, NC State
- To be extended