Topics of Interest

VEM provides a forum where researchers and practitioners from academia and industry can present and discuss research related to software visualization, maintenance, and evolution. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Automation of software engineering tasks with LLM and other foundational models (e.g., vision models)
• AI-assisted software design and architecture
• Continuous integration and deployment
• Education on software maintenance and evolution
• Human aspects of software maintenance and evolution
• Industrial experience with using software visualization
• Integration of software visualization tools with development environments
• Mining software repositories
• New technologies applied to software visualization
• Program comprehension
• Program repair
• Prompt engineering for software engineering
• Software analytics
• Software architecture
• Software engineering and data science
• Software evolution analysis
• Software migration and renovation
• Software quality
• Software refactoring and restructuring
• Software reverse engineering and reengineering
• Software testing and debugging
• Source code analysis and manipulation
• Source code change analysis
• Source code readability and legibility
• Static and dynamic source code visualization
• Sustainable software engineering
• Visualization of or to support software development activities (e.g., software testing)
• Visualization-based techniques in software engineering education

Papers presenting studies, tools, datasets, or innovative ideas are welcome. Experimental evaluation of new tools and ideas is desirable, but it is not a precondition to submitting a paper to the workshop. VEM encourages the submission of research in progress and preliminary results.

Open Science Policy

Openness in science is the key to fostering progress via transparency, reproducibility, and replicability. Ideally, all research output should be accessible to the public, and all empirical studies should be reproducible. VEM 2024 encourages authors to disclose: 1) the source code of relevant software used or proposed in the paper, including that used to retrieve and analyze data, 2) the data used and/or produced in the paper, and 3) instructions for other researchers describing how to reproduce or replicate the results.

Important Dates

All dates refer to midnight 23:59:59 AoE.

Reviewing Process

Evaluation Criteria
The evaluation criteria include the following aspects:

• Clarity of the paper
• Novelty of the contribution
• Relevance to software visualization, evolution, or maintenance
• Soundness of the methodology
• Quality of evaluation (if applicable)
• Open science and ability to replicate*

* VEM 2024 encourages authors to make their artifacts open and accessible for the sake of good science. Papers will not be rejected if authors do not follow the recommendation of disclosing artifacts, but doing so might be one (but not the only one) positive factor for reviewers to recommend acceptance.

Double-Blind Review Process
VEM 2024 will employ a double-blind review process. Both the authors and the reviewers must make every effort to honor the double-blind review process. Authors should check the submission guidelines below. Reviewers should not search for the title of the submitted papers on the Internet nor try to deduce the authors of the papers.

Submission Guidelines

Papers can be written in Portuguese or English (Portuguese papers do not need an English abstract). Submissions in English are strongly encouraged so that your research can be accessed by non-Portuguese speaking researchers.

In this edition we are accepting three types of submissions:

• Full research papers (min 8, max 10 pages with a limit of two additional pages for references): Full research papers should present high-quality technical papers that disclose original and unpublished results related to software visualization, evolution, and maintenance. These papers must bring cutting-edge academic contributions to the field with a critical analysis of the results. papers describing models, methods, experimental studies, and industrial experience reports are welcome;


• Position papers (max 5 pages with a limit of one additional page for references): Position papers should challenge the scientific community and national industry to respond to relevant questions that challenge the status quo in the context of software visualization, evolution, and maintenance. The papers must include (at a minimum) the following items: (I) What is the major challenge proposed; (II) What are the specific context(s) related to it and its relevance in the national and/or international context of software visualization, evolution, and maintenance; (III) What real initiatives is it related to (if any); and (iv) Ways to evaluate the progress of the proposed challenge;


• Researcher group presentation (max 2 pages with a limit of one additional page for references): The "Researcher Group Presentation" offers a unique opportunity for research groups to demonstrate the relevance and impact of their work, promote collaborations, and exchange ideas with other researchers and professionals in the fields of software visualization, evolution, and maintenance. Selected groups will have the opportunity to present their research during the workshop in a poster format, providing a platform for enriching discussions and networking. Authors are expected to provide an overview of: (I) Introduction to the Research Group, including presenting the members and their areas of expertise; group history and main research lines; (II) Recent and Ongoing Projects, including methodologies used and main challenges faced; (III) Practical applications and collaborations with industry or other research institutions; and (IV) Publications and Scientific Contributions.


• Short Papers (max 5 pages with a limit of one additional page for references): Short papers should describe work in progress, a research project, tool, or technique, or present research perspectives on the workshop's themes. Authors are expected to provide an overview of their research, including objectives, methodology, preliminary results, and challenges encountered so far. This type of paper will be evaluated using the same criteria as the "full research papers" category, emphasizing the potential for discussion that the paper can generate at the workshop;

These different categories offer researchers who are at different stages in their research maturity the opportunity to benefit from workshop participation.

Page limits include all text, tables, figures, appendices, and references. All papers must be submitted in PDF Format and formatted with the SBC Conferences Template available at SBC template for VEM.

For the Full research papers, Short papers papers and Position papers categories, the paper's presentation is through slides presentation (in person); for the Researcher group presentation category, it is through a poster presentation.

Submissions must not reveal the authors' identities for the double-blind review process. In particular, the authors’ names and affiliations must be omitted on the title page and headers of the paper, and references to their prior work should be in the third person. If you want to make available any artifact in time for submission, please make it anonymous. There are existing tools for doing that easily. For instance, Anonymous GitHub is an open-source tool that helps you quickly double-blind GitHub repositories. VEM encourages authors to make artifacts publicly available. If the authors want to do so but do not want to take the risk to break the double-blind review process, they are invited to add the artifacts' links in the camera-ready versions in case of paper acceptance.

Papers must be submitted electronically through JEMS (Which will be available as soon). Submitted papers must be unpublished and should not be under review elsewhere.

If you have any doubts about the preparation of your manuscript, please do not hesitate to send an email to vemworkshop@gmail.com.

Regarding the Use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) or AI-assisted Technologies in Research Papers

By submitting papers to VEM 2024, authors acknowledge that they comply with the Generative AI usage policy, based on existing policies proposed by IEEE, ACM, and Springer.

Prohibited:

• Listing generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT, as authors of papers.
• Using articles or sections entirely produced by generative AI tools.

Allowed (with explicit mention in acknowledgments):

• Using generative AI tools to create content, with mention in the acknowledgments section of the paper indicating what was generated and which tool was used. It is important to verify the terms of use of the tool, and such verification is the responsibility of the authors. For instance, in the acknowledgments: ChatGPT was used to generate the first paragraph of Section 3 and to create Table 3.2.

Allowed (without the need for mention):

• Using AI or AI-assisted technologies to enhance image quality in terms of contrast and clarity;
• Using generative AI tools to edit and improve the quality of your existing text (similar to an assistant like Grammarly for enhancing spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, and engagement).

Presentation and Publication

Upon notification of acceptance, the authors of accepted papers will be asked to prepare their camera-ready versions. At least one author of each accepted paper is expected to register and present the paper at the VEM 2024 workshop. All accepted and presented papers will be published in the workshop electronic proceedings, available in the SBC OpenLib (SOL) digital library.

Best Paper Award

Outstanding papers will be considered for receiving an award. Awarded papers will be announced during the workshop. Their authors will be invited to submit an extended version in English to the Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development (JSERD).

Program Committee Co-Chairs

• Anderson Uchôa (UFC - Itapajé)
• Larissa Rocha (UNEB)

Program Committee

• Allysson Allex Araújo (UFCA)
• Ana Carla Bibiano (PUC-Rio)
• Cafeo (UNICAMP)
• Bruno Gadelha (UFAM)
• Carla Bezerra (UFC)
• Claudio Sant`Anna (UFBA)
• Eduardo Guerra (Free University of Bolzano)
• Igor Wiese (UTFPR)
• Ivan Machado (UFBA)
• João Montandon (UFMG)
• Liliane Vale (UFG)
• Lincoln Rocha (UFC)
• Lidia Nascimento (UFBA)
• Luana Martins (UFBA)
• Luciana Lourdes (IFMG)
• Mairieli Wessel (Radboud University)
• Marcos Dósea (UFS)
• Nabor Mendonça (UNIFOR)
• Paola Accioly (UFCA)
• Paulo Meirelles (USP)
• Pedro Santos Neto (UFPI)
• Rafael Durelli (UFLA)
• Ricardo Terra (UFLA)
• Rodrigo Andrade (UFAPE)
• Talita Ribeiro (UERJ)
• Tássio Virgínio (UFBA)
• Vinicius Durelli (UFSJ)