This issue contains five regular-submission manuscripts covering a wide range of topics from domain model extraction through optimization of the build process, plagiarism detection, defect prediction, and a tool for multitenant SaaS applications. It also contains an article on tools supporting product line evolution in our special section on the long term evolution of software that was guest edited by Michael Goedicke and Jeff Kramer.

  • In “Automatic Query Rewriting Schemes for Multitenant SaaS Applications” doi:10.1007/s10515-015-0178-2, Liao, Chen, Tan, and Chen address the problem of multiple applications accessing the same physical database, using their own specific query logics. The paper presents a collection of query rewriting schemes for use with the Universal Table schema mapping technique that allow translating tenant-specific queries into backend database queries.

  • In “Multiple kernel ensemble learning for software defect prediction” doi:10.1007/s10515-015-0179-1, Wang, Zhang, Jing, and Zhang use advanced machine learning techniques to predict defects in software.

  • In “Detecting plagiarized mobile apps using API birthmarks” doi:10.1007/s10515-015-0182-6, Kim, Gokhale, Ganapathy, and Srivastava address the interesting and increasingly important problem of detecting when code is reused without the permission of the original developer (or owner). Their approach, implemented in the area of mobile applicaitons, is based upon observing interactions between the app and the underlying mobile platform APIs.

  • McIntosh, Adams, Nagappan, and Hassan explore profiling the build process in order to identify header files that, if improved, will in turn lead to faster builds in their paper, “Identifying and understanding header file hotspots in C/C++ build processes” doi:10.1007/s10515-015-0183-5.

  • In “Concept extraction from business documents for software engineering projects” doi:10.1007/s10515-015-0184-4, Ménard and Ratté describe a model-centered process for extracting domain concepts from business documents.

1 Special section on long term evolution of software systems

Michael Goedicke of Paluno and the University of Duisburg-Essen and Jeff Kramer of Imperial College London together originally conceived of inviting a special issue on the topic of automation support for the long term evolution of software systems. While the community has studied maintenance and evolution quite extensively, Michael and Jeff were particularly interested in the issues raised when the software system or product line is long lived. They received several submissions in this relatively less studied topic area and managed a rigorous and thorough review process. Assisted by expert reviewers, they sorted through a pool of papers describing exciting ideas, but ultimately determined that only one article was mature enough to warrant journal publication at this time.

  • In the paper, “Reasoning about product-line evolution using complex feature model differences” doi:10.1007/s10515-015-0185-3, Bürdek, Kehrer, Lochau, Reuling, Kelter, and Schürr first observe that the evolution of a (software) product line results in changes made to the feature model and its accompanying diagram representations. These changes are often ad hoc and difficult to understand semantically. The contributions in this work provide an analysis that first finds and documents the changes to the feature model between versions, representing them as edit sequences. It also then provides a method to reason about semantic changes resulting from the changes. They evaluate their approach in the context of a real world automation system case study.

Please enjoy all these contributions and, as always, you are invited to email me at Bob.ASEJ@gmail.com with your thoughts on this issue or the Journal in general.