For JSS's full CfP including information on Special Issues, Industry, Trends, and Journal First tracks please continue to read for further details.

The Journal of Systems and Software publishes papers covering all aspects of software engineering. All articles should provide evidence to support their claims, e.g. through empirical studies, simulation, formal proofs or other types of validation. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

    Methods and tools for software requirements, design, architecture, verification and validation, testing, maintenance and evolution
    Agile, model-driven, service-oriented, open source and global software development
    Human/social aspects in software engineering and developer experience
    Artificial Intelligence, data analytics and big data applied in software engineering
    Metrics and evaluation of software development resources
    DevOps, continuous integration, build and test automation
    Software Engineering education
    Ethical/societal aspects of Software Engineering
    Software Engineering for AI systems
    Software Engineering for Sustainability
    Methods and tools for empirical software engineering research

The journal welcomes reports of practical experience for all of these topics, as well as replication studies and studies with negative results. The journal appreciates the submission of systematic literature reviews, mapping studies and meta-analyses. However, these should report interesting and important results, rather than merely providing statistics on publication year, venue etc.

JSS supports Open Science and reproducible research. Therefore, authors are encouraged to make Open Science material available at the time of submission and after acceptance of their manuscript, e.g., by submitting artifacts related to a study to an archived open repository (such as arXiv.org, zenodo.org, Mendeley, etc.). Also, authors are encouraged to explicitly reference Open Science material in their manuscript (e.g., via a DOI from the open repository). If authors are not able to disclose any material (for example, industrial data subject to non-disclosure agreements), we encourage authors to explicitly acknowledge this by including a short statement in their manuscript. Depending on the type of research presented in a manuscript, Open Science material could include study protocols, (anonymized) raw or analyzed data, data analysis scripts, source code, customized tools and infrastructures, experimental material, codebooks, etc. If authors agree to participate in the JSS Open Science Initiative, after the acceptance of a manuscript, they will be invited to submit a link to Open Science material for review by the JSS Open Science Board. After a successful review (which does not impact the acceptance of the manuscript) considering availability and usability of the material, the publisher will add a statement to the final version of the manuscript acknowledging that the Open Science package was validated by the JSS Open Science Board.

In addition to regular papers, JSS features two special tracks (In Practice, New Ideas and Trends Papers), as well as special issues.

In Practice is exclusively focused on work that increases knowledge transfer from industry to research. It accepts: (1) Applied Research Reports where we invite submissions that report results (positive or negative) concerning the experience of applying/evaluating systems and software technologies (methods, techniques and tools) in real industrial settings. These comprise empirical studies conducted in industry (e.g., action research, case studies) or experience reports that may help understanding situations in which technologies really work and their impact. Submissions should include information on the industrial setting, provide motivation, explain the events leading to the outcomes, including the challenges faced, summarize the outcomes, and conclude with lessons learned, take-away messages, and practical advice based on the described experience. Contributing authors from industry are encouraged but not mandatory. (2) Practitioner Insights where we invite experience reports showing what actually happens in practical settings, illustrating the challenges (and pain) that practitioners face, and presenting lessons learned. Problem descriptions with significant details on the context, underlying causes and symptoms, and technical and organizational impact are also welcome. Practitioner insights papers may also comprise invited opinionated views on the evolution of chosen topic areas in practice. In contrast to applied research reports, practitioner insights are limited to four pages and the first author must be from industry. Finally, submissions to this track should be within scope of the journal's above topics of interest and they will be evaluated through industry-appropriate criteria for their merit in reporting useful industrial experience rather than in terms of academic novelty of research results.

New Ideas and Trends Papers

New ideas, especially those related to new research trends, emerge quickly. To accommodate timely dissemination thereof, JSS introduces the New Ideas and Trends Paper (NITP). NITPs should focus on the systems/software engineering aspects of new emerging areas, including: the internet of things, big data, cloud computing, software ecosystems, cyber-physical systems, green/sustainable systems, continuous software engineering, crowdsourcing, and the like. We distinguish two types of NITPs:

    A short paper that discusses a single contribution to a specific new trend or a new idea.
    A long paper that provides a survey of a specific trend, as well as a (possibly speculative) outline of a solution.

NITPs are not required to be fully validated, but preliminary results that endorse the merit of the proposed ideas are welcomed.

We anticipate revisiting specific new trends periodically, for instance through reflection or progress reports.

New Ideas and Trend Papers warrant speedy publication.

Special Issue proposals

To submit a proposal for a special issue please submit your proposal here to Special Issues Editors Prof. Raffaela Mirandola and Prof. Laurence Duchien. Please visit the special issue guidelines page first to review the proposal guidelines and to download the proposal template required when submitting a proposal.

Journal First Initiative

Authors of JSS accepted papers have the opportunity to present their work in those conferences that offer a Journal First track. Using this track, researchers may take the best from two worlds: ensuring high quality in the JSS publication (thorough, multi-phase review process of a long manuscript), while getting feedback from a community of experts and fostering possible collaborations during a scientific event.

Details may vary from conference to conference, but generally speaking, JSS papers to be presented in a Journal First track must report completely new research results or present novel contributions that significantly extend previous work. The ultimate decision to include a paper in the conference program is up to the conference chairs, not JSS. A JSS paper may be presented only once through a Journal First track.

As of today, the list of conferences with which JSS is collaborating, or has collaborated, through a Journal First track, is: ASE, ICSME, SANER, RE, ESEM, PROFES, and APSEC.

Special Issue on Impactful Software Architecture
截稿日期: 2026-01-31

The European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) reaches its 19th edition in 2025, marking nearly two decades of fostering innovation, collaboration, and knowledge sharing in software architecture. ECSA has consistently served as a premier platform for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss cutting-edge innovations, trends, experiences, and concerns for software architecture. From its inception to the present day, ECSA has witnessed notable transformations, expansions, and paradigm shifts, continually adapting to the evolving landscape of software architecture.

Guest editors:

Nour Ali, Reader
Brunel University London, UK

Vasilios Andrikopoulos, Associate Professor
University of Groningen, the Netherlands

Cesare Pautasso, Full Professor
University of Lugano, Switzerland

Jacopo Soldani, Associate Professor
University of Pisa, Italy

Special issue information:

This special issue of the Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) invites authors from ECSA 2025, as well as the broader software architecture community, to submit original research papers or significantly extended versions of their conference presentations. The special issue focuses on “impactful software architecture". Software architecture plays a pivotal role in designing robust, scalable, and maintainable systems, influencing both technical and business outcomes. This special issue aims at exploring the principles, practices, and emerging trends that drive architectural decisions, highlighting their tangible impact on system performance, collaboration, and long-term sustainability. We seek contributions that examine how architectural strategies – whether well-established or cutting-edge – shape real-world applications across diverse domains, from traditional enterprise systems to rapidly evolving fields such as AI-driven and autonomous applications. Through this special issue, we aim to foster a deeper understanding of the transformative role of software architecture in addressing contemporary challenges and advancing the state of the art.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

    Foundational principles of software architecture
    Relationship between requirements engineering and software architecture
    Quality attributes and software architectures
    Architecture practices for secure, explainable, and trustworthy software
    Architecture design and analysis
    Architecture description languages and meta-models
    Architecture verification and validation
    Management of architectural knowledge, decisions, and rationale
    Architecture patterns, styles, and tactics
    Architecture viewpoints and views
    Architecture conformance
    Software architecture virtualization and visualization
    Architecture-centric process models and frameworks
    Software architecture and agile, incremental, iterative, and continuous development
    Component-based models and deployment, middleware, and DevOps
    Software architecture and system architecture
    Software tools, languages, and environments for architecture-centric software engineering
    Ethics, cultural, economic, business, social, human, and managerial aspects of software architecture
    Architecture and technical debt
    Architecting for sustainable and environment-friendly systems
    Applying AI and LLMs in software architecture and architecting for AI and LLMintensive systems.
    Software architecture education
    Cross-disciplinary approaches to software architecture
    Architectures for reconfigurable and self-adaptive systems
    Architectural concerns of autonomic systems
    Software architecture applied to new and emerging areas, such as the cloud/edge, big data, blockchain, cyber-physical systems, IoT, autonomous systems, systems-ofsystems, energy-aware software, quantum computing, AI-enabled systems
    Empirical studies and datasets in software architecture
    Diversity, equity, and inclusion in activities related to software architecture

In line with JSS policies, submissions consisting of surveys, literature reviews, or mapping studies on the aforementioned or related topics will not be considered for this special issue and will be desk-rejected.