Methods of Software Design: Techniques and Applications

Science of Computer Programming is dedicated to the distribution, via publication of papers and software, of research results in the areas of software systems development, use and maintenance, including the software aspects of hardware design. The journal has a wide scope ranging from the many facets of methodological foundations to the details of technical issues and aspects of industrial practice.

The subjects of interest to SCP cover the entire spectrum of methods for the entire life cycle of software systems, including:

    Requirements, specification, design, validation, verification, coding, testing, maintenance, metrics and renovation of software;
    Design, implementation and evaluation of programming languages;
    Programming environments, development tools, visualisation and animation;
    Management of the development process;
    Human factors in software, software for social interaction, software for social computing;
    Cyber physical systems, and software for the interaction between the physical and the machine;
    Software aspects of infrastructure services, system administration, and network management.

Special emphasis is given to recent trends in software development, such as software architecture, component-based software development and web-based software engineering.

SCP is divided into two tracks. These are: (1) Research papers and (2) Software.

Research Papers Track

These cover four lines of work: (1) Concepts and methodology, (2) Formal techniques, (3) Experimental software technology, (4) Descriptive software technology.

    Concepts and methodology is open for methodological, philosophical and sociological studies on all aspects of computer software production and usage, including ethics. Also short papers are allowed here, called viewpoints.

    Formal techniques emphasizes the development and the pragmatic application of formal and semi-formal techniques. Submissions that the editors consider mainly mathematical or theoretical in nature, with the preliminary consent of the authors, will formally be forwarded to the sister journal TCS.

    Experimental software technology is open for expositions on implementations of and experiments with novel programming languages, systems and methods.

    Descriptive software technology deals with observational studies of current software development practices, reporting on new languages, systems and methods, including survey reports on the various themes.

Software Track

SCP disseminates impactful and re-usable scientific software through Original Software Publications. The software track is open for papers describing new software tools of relevance to SCP under the strict condition that the source code of the tools is open. Moreover, the results should be reproducible and show general applicability. By means of the article type of Original Software Publications, versioned software product, corpora and datasets can enter the review process and get published. A copy of the 'accepted for publication' version of software will be copied to the journal's GitHub repository for indexing purposes. Go to the Science of Computer Programming GitHub repository.

Badged for Reproducibility: Software submitted to SCP for consideration is considered for certification for computational reproducibility by the CodeOcean, a cloud based computational reproducibility platform that helps the community by enabling sharing of code and data as a resource for non-commercial use. Certified papers will be given additional exposure by having an attached Reproducibility Badge, and by being listed on the CodeOcean website.

Special Issues: The Journal welcomes Special Issues within its Scope either resulting from conferences or workshops or from dedicated editorial efforts. There can be special issues for research papers or for software.