Introduction

Software systems have played critical roles in scientific research, business and society. Research on software systems focuses on construction, operation, maintenance, and assessment of software systems. This special section is an effort to encourage and promote research to address challenges from the software systems perspective. The goal of this special section is to present the state-of-the-art and high quality original research papers in the area of software systems. Extended versions of papers published in conferences, symposiums or workshop proceedings may be submitted. Especially we welcome the extended versions of papers published in first class software systems conferences. However, survey papers will not be considered.

This special section includes two themes: Data-Driven Software Engineering; Software Testing and Analysis. However, this special section also welcomes all other aspects of research on software systems.

Past articles from the JCST Special Section on Software Systems are athttp://jcst.ict.ac.cn:8080/jcst/EN/column/item160.shtml#ss (published in Vol. 30, No. 5 and Vol. 31, No. 5).

Theme: Data-Driven Software Engineering

With the evolution of software systems and how software is used, data has started to play an increasingly important role in software development. Data, i.e. large-scale software artifacts of various types, is pervasive at different software development stages; and hidden in the data is information about the software quality, user experience, as well as the dynamics of software development. In order for researchers and practitioners to exchange their latest studies and experiences on using the data-driven approach to addressing different challenges in the software domain, the theme welcomes research papers that present high quality original work, as well as industry reports that present real world rigorous empirical studies from which others can benefit. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

* Instrumentation, data collection, and data quality in software development 
* Data infrastructure and representation for scalable and efficient software analysis 
* Data analysis techniques and their applications in software development 
* Visualization techniques and models to accomplish software development tasks 
* Mining repositories across multiple software projects 
* Analysis and models for social development involving large-scale software projects 
* Monitoring, diagnosing, and managing complex software systems using multiple data sources 
* Understanding usage patterns of software users and improving software usability 
* Empirical study on software development

Theme: Software Testing and Analysis

The Software Testing and Analysis theme encompasses all the research challenges that concern software quality achieved through software testing and any analysis techniques that contribute in detecting/fixing defects in the end-product software. The ever increasing diversity, ubiquity, and dynamism of modern software systems is making such software testing and analysis more challenging. The call is open to researchers presenting their latest approaches for ensuring the quality of today’s complex software systems. In this spirit, this theme welcomes both research papers that present high quality original work and industry reports that present real world rigorous empirical studies from which others can benefit. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Unit, integration, and system testing 
* Testing in globally-distributed organizations 
* Model-based testing 
* Model-driven development and testing 
* Domain specific testing, such as: 
    Security testing 
    Web-service testing 
    Database testing 
    Embedded software testing 
    Performance and QoS testing 
    Testing large-scale distributed systems 
* Testing and analysis tools 
* Agile/iterative/incremental testing processes 
* Software diagnosis 
* Static and dynamic analysis for fault detection, localization and fixing 
* Metrics and empirical studies

Important Dates 
Submission: April 20, 2017 
Acceptance Decision: July 5, 2017
Publication: September 2017

Submission Procedures 
All submissions must be done electronically through JCST's e-submission system athttps://mc03.manuscriptcentral.com/jcst, with a Manuscript Type: "Special Section on Software Systems 2017".

Leading Editor 
Tao Xie (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA), taoxie@illinois.edu

Guest Editors for Data-Driven Software Engineering Theme
Yuanfang Cai (Drexel University, USA), yfcai@cs.drexel.edu
Xuanzhe Liu (Peking University, China), liuxuanzhe@pku.edu.cn
Xiaoyin Wang (University of Texas at San Antonio, USA), xiaoyin.wang@utsa.edu

Guest Editors for Software Testing and Analysis Theme
Mithun Acharya (ABB Corporate Research, USA), mithun.acharya@us.abb.com
Marcelo d'Amorim (Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil), damorim@cin.ufpe.br
Xiaoxing Ma (Nanjing University, China), xxm@nju.edu.cn