ASE

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 29th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2014). This conference publication contains the proceedings of ASE 2014, held in Vsters, Sweden, on September 15-19, 2014. The ASE Conference series is the premier research forum for automating software engineering. Each year, it brings together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss foundations, techniques and tools for automating the analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance of large software systems.

It is a wonderful time to do research in automated software engineering! Everything is becoming programmable -- phones, TVs, tablets, cars, and even watches and glasses. Software engineers are the ones who bring life to these programmable devices by writing systems and applications software. As software engineering researchers, we are the ones who are tasked with developing techniques and tools that will help software engineers in meeting the exploding demand in software production. We are facing an endless list of research problems that not only bring many challenges, but also bring many opportunities for contribution and impact.

ASE 2014 was located in Vsterås, Sweden's sixth largest city with a 1000-year-old history. Vsterås is a cultural, educational, and industrial city located by the beautiful Lake Mälaren. The city is the home of ABB's largest research center and it hosts other major companies like Bombardier Transportation, Westinghouse Electric Sweden, Alstom Power Sweden, Luvata Sweden, Enics Sweden, and nearby placed Volvo Construction Equipment.

The exciting program of this year's ASE conference consisted of high quality contributions in this vibrant research area that were selected from a record number of submissions after a careful, thorough and selective reviewing process. This year, for the main track of the ASE conference, we invited three categories of submissions: (1) Technical Research Papers that describe innovative research in automating software development activities or automated support to users engaged in such activities; (2) Experience Papers that describe a significant experience in applying automated software engineering technologies and identify and discuss important lessons learned so that other researchers and/or practitioners can benefit from the experience; and (3) New Ideas Papers that describe novel research directions in automated software engineering that are in an early stage of investigation.

We received 337 paper submissions this year -- a record for the ASE conference series! Thirteen submissions were desk rejected without review since they failed to follow the instructions given in the call for papers or were clearly out of scope of the conference. One paper was rejected as a double submission with another conference. The remaining 323 submissions -- 276 full papers and 48 new idea papers -- were reviewed by the members of the Program Committee and the Expert Review Panel, with each paper receiving at least 3 reviews. We also had a very active online discussion phase, with many long and detailed discussions among the members of the Program Committee and the Expert Review Panel. During a two-day physical PC meeting held at the University of Toronto on June 25--26, 2014, the members of the Program Committee compiled the final selection of papers to be presented at ASE 2014. This careful and thorough reviewing process resulted in selection of 50 technical research papers, 5 experience papers, and 27 new ideas papers (many of these were recategorized full papers).

In addition to the papers presented in the main track, the ASE conference program also included 12 tool demonstration papers selected by the Tools Program Committee, and 10 doctoral symposium papers, selected by the Doctoral Symposium Committee. Two workshops and three tutorials were selected by the Tutorials and Workshops Program Committee and were co-located with the conference. Several other events were co-located with the ASE conference: the 7th International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE) and the 13th International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts & Experiences (GPCE'14), together with their workshops, and the Working Meeting of Industrial Research School in Embedded Software and Systems (ITS-EASY).

The ASE conference program was enriched by three keynote talks: Prof. Luciano Floridi from the University of Oxford on the logic of information design; Prof. Andrei Voronkov from the University of Manchester on the EasyChair system; and Dr. Magnus Larsson, Head of ABB's India Development Center, on experiences from developing industrial software systems with long lifecycles.