Aims and scope

Automated Software Engineering is an archival, peer-reviewed journal publishing research, tutorial papers, survey and accounts of significant industrial experience in the foundations, techniques, tools and applications of automated software engineering technology. This includes the study of techniques for constructing, understanding, adapting, and modelling software artifacts and processes. Both automatic systems and collaborative systems are within the scope of the journal, as are computational models of human software engineering activities. Knowledge representations and artificial intelligence techniques applicable to automated software engineering are of interest, as are formal techniques that support or provide theoretical foundations.

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to: specification and design representation schemes, both formal and informal; descriptions and models of the development process; tools and environments to support software development; cognition in software development, including studies of specifiers, designers and implementors, and cognitive properties of representation schemes, programming and programming languages; software development methods, analysis and validation; requirements elicitation, acquisition and formalization; system rationale; software quality and metrics; software reuse and adaptation; animation and execution of specifications and designs; domain modelling and analysis; software visualization; software object management; development of user interfaces; group and team work in software engineering; development of distributed, real-time, embedded and composite systems; systems integration; software evolution and maintenance; system testing; reverse engineering and program understanding; documentation and program explanation.

Automated Software Engineering is published bi-yearly by Springer, with worldwide distribution to individuals, industry and institutions. It includes reviews of books, software, conferences, and workshops.

Special Issue on Genetic Improvement, 2026
Submission Date: 2026-07-31

Genetic Improvement is the application of evolutionary and search-based optimisation methods to the improvement of existing software. It has been used to improve both software functional properties, such as fixing bug or performing automated code transplantation, and software non-functional properties, such as minimising execution time, memory usage, or energy consumption.

We invite submissions that discuss recent developments in all areas of research on, and applications of, Genetic Improvement. Topics of interest include both the theory and practice of Genetic Improvement. Applications of GI include, but are not limited to:

- Improve runtime efficiency
- Decrease memory consumption
- Decrease energy consumption
- Transplant new functionality
- Specialise software
- Generate multiple versions of software
- Improve low level or binary code
- GI techniques in industrial settings
- Use of AI/large language models in combination with GI
- Use of AI/large language models to improve GI or vice versa