RELENG 2014

Release engineering deals with all activities in between regular development and delivery of a software product to the end user, i.e., integration, build, test execution, packaging and delivery of software. Although research on this topic goes back for decades, the increasing heterogeneity and variability of software products along with the recent trend to reduce the release cycle to days or even hours starts to question some of the common beliefs and practices of the field.

The RELENG workshop series aims to provide a highly interactive forum for researchers and practitioners in release engineering to: (1) make researchers aware of the challenges and research opportunities for modern release engineering, and practitioners of the latest research results; (2) share experiences with practical approaches, tools, methods and techniques that are enabling rapid, robust deployment, and (3) build and maintain connections between the different communities.

The RELENG 2014 workshop will consist of a keynote, practitioner talks, paper presentations, working groups and a fishbowl panel for semi-structured group discussions. Two inspiring invited talks by Chuck Rossi, release engineering manager at Facebook, and Dinah McNutt, release engineer at Google, will set the stage for the rest of the workshop, introducing the challenges of modern software companies related to release engineering. RELENG 2014 will also feature a poster session to allow researchers and practitioners to present, show-case, and discuss their most recent advances, experiences, and challenges in release engineering in an informal setting.

Since bringing together practitioners and researchers is the core goal of RELENG, one of the co-organizers is a release engineer at Mozilla and half of the PC consists of release engineers, so we guarantee that each paper or abstract submission receives at least one review from a practitioner. Furthermore, since each edition of RELENG alternates between an academic and an industry host, we are excited to announce that RELENG 2014 will be hosted at Google in Mountain View, CA!

Topics for papers, talks, and posters include but are not limited to:

Technical Papers (4 pages) should identify challenges, discuss opposing viewpoints, outline processes, or present solutions related to various aspects of release engineering.

Talk Abstracts (500 words) are only open to practitioners and should describe in 500 words or less, a talk on a key aspect of release engineering. These talks should be primarily experience-based and should be used as a means of communicating challenges that are in need of research.

Poster Abstracts (500 words) are open to both practitioners and researchers and should describe in 500 words or less, the recent advances, experiences and/or challenges in release engineering that their poster will present.

Submissions should use IEEE templates and should be submitted through easychair. Talk and poster abstract authors can organize the text into one or multiple sections, but it should be uploaded as a pdf (together with a 2 or 3 sentence summary in the easychair site's "abstract" box).

There are no dedicated workshop proceedings (submissions will be archived on the workshop's web page), but in parallel to the workshop, a call will be launched for the first ever IEEE Software Special Issue on Release Engineering. RELENG participants will be able to benefit from direct discussions with and feedback from leading release engineering professionals to improve and polish a Special Issue submission. So, grab your chance and attend RELENG!