21st IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation

How to Submit to SCAM 2021

There are several different tracks in the SCAM 2021 program, this page contains an overview for those tracks, and additional information required to submit. Each track has its own submission page and deadlines, please consult the specific page of the track for all of the relevant details.

The below table contains an overview of the tracks, links to their pages, and papers accepted previously at the tracks:

The sample submissions were selected from the distinghuished papers of SCAM 2020 by the PC chairs.

Submission Guidelines

Papers must conform to the IEEE proceedings paper format guidelines. Templates in Latex and Word are available on IEEE's website. All submissions must be in English. All authors, reviewers, and organizers are expected to uphold the IEEE Code of Conduct. Failure to do so may lead to a (desk) rejection of the paper.

Papers can be submitted using EasyChair.

Double Anonymous Review

We follow a double-anonymous reviewing process. Submitted papers must adhere to the following rules:

• Author names and affiliations must be omitted. (The track co-chairs will check compliance before reviewing begins.)
• References to authors' own related work must be in the third person. (For example, not "We build on our previous work..." but rather "We build on the work of...")

Please see the Double-Anonymous Reviewing FAQ for more information and guidance. If the program chairs find that authors did not respect the rules of double-anonymous review they can decide to (desk) reject the paper.

Open Science Policy

SCAM encourages open science practices. Sharing data sets, replication packages, or preprints are not required, but we provide guidance for those wishing to do so.

If you decide to share data or scripts, we encourage you to use an online archival site such as zenodo.org, figshare.com, or archive.org. These sites ensure the content is archived and generate a DOI for the content, enabling it to be cited. To learn more about how to share data while maintaining double-anonymous, read the explanation provided by Daniel Graziotin available here https://ineed.coffee/5205/how-to-disclose-data-for-double-blind-review-and-make-it-archived-open-data-upon-acceptance/.

We also encourage you to submit such artifacts to the joint artifact evaluation track of ICSME, SCAM, and VISSOFT (see below).

We recognise that anonymising artifacts such as source code is more difficult than preserving anonymity in a paper. We ask authors to take a best effort approach to not reveal their identities. We will also ask reviewers to avoid trying to identify authors by looking at commit histories and other such information that is not easily anonymised. Authors wanting to share GitHub repositories may want to look into using https://anonymous.4open.science/ which is an open source tool that helps you to quickly Double-anonymous your repository.

SCAM supports and encourages Green Open Access also called self-archiving. We encourage authors to self-archive a preprint of your accepted manuscript in an e-print server such as arXiv.org. Open access increases the availability of your work and increases citation impact (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013636). To learn more about open access, please read the Green Open Access FAQ (https://avandeursen.com/2016/11/06/green-open-access-faq/) by Arie van Deursen. Note that if your research includes scraped GitHub data, the GitHub Terms of Service require that “publications resulting from that research are open access” (https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/). If possible, we recommend that you archive your paper (e.g., on arXiv or on your website) only after the SCAM reviewing process is completed, to avoid undermining the double-anonymous reviewing process in place.

The combined AE track will introduce the artifact evaluation for the first time to SCAM! Authors of (short and long) papers accepted in the ICSME, SCAM, or VISSOFT 2021 are invited to submit their artifacts for evaluation to the ICSME 2021 Joint Artifact Evaluation Track here.

Proceedings

All accepted papers will appear in the proceedings which will be available through the IEEE Digital Library.

Special Issue

Extended versions of papers accepted at one of the SCAM 2021 tracks will be invited for submission in one of the software engineering research journals.

Call for Research Track Papers

The 21th IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2021) aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on theory, techniques, and applications that concern analysis and/or manipulation of the source code of software systems. The term "source code" refers to any fully executable description of a software system, such as machine code, (very) high-level languages, and executable graphical representations of systems. The term "analysis" refers to any (semi-)automated procedure that yields insight into source code, while "manipulation" refers to any automated or semi-automated procedure that takes and returns source code. While much attention in the wider software engineering community is directed towards other aspects of systems development and evolution, such as specification, design, and requirements engineering, it is the source code that contains the only precise description of the behavior of a system. Hence, the analysis and manipulation of source code remains a pressing concern for which SCAM 2021 solicits high quality paper submissions.

Covered Topics and Paper Formats

We welcome submission of papers that describe original and significant work in the field of source code analysis and manipulation. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• abstract interpretation
• bad smell detection
• bug location and prediction
• clone detection
• concern, concept, and feature localization and mining
• decompilation
• energy efficient source code
• natural language analysis of source code artifacts
• program comprehension
• program slicing
• program transformation and refactoring
• repository, revision, and change analysis
• security vulnerability analysis
• source level metrics
• source level optimization
• source-level testing and verification
• static and dynamic analysis

SCAM explicitly solicits results from any theoretical or technological domain that can be applied to these and similar topics. Submitted papers should describe original, unpublished, and significant work and must not have been previously accepted for publication nor be concurrently submitted for review in another journal, book, conference, or workshop.

Before submitting please follow the guidelines in How to Submit. Additionally, papers must not exceed 12 pages (the last 2 pages can be used for references only) and the papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format via EasyChair. Submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee, judging the paper on its novelty, quality, importance, evaluation, and scientific rigor. If the paper is accepted, at least one author must register for the conference and present the paper.

Important Dates for Research Papers

All submission dates are at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12).

Call for Engineering Track Papers

The Engineering Track in the 21st IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM) looks for papers that discuss innovations and solutions to practical problems that researchers and practitioners face in source code analysis and manipulation of software systems. With the research advancements in source code analysis during the past decades, the industry has adopted many of the research ideas and built tools and techniques to solve real-world problems in daily jobs of software engineers. The Engineering Track provides an opportunity to discuss these important and often overlooked ideas and achievements so that software engineers and researchers can use them to improve their engineering development and produce high-quality software. This track aims at bringing researchers and software engineers to communicate and share their insights and collaborate on tools, libraries, and infrastructure for source code analysis.

This track welcomes six-page papers that report on the design and implementation of tools for source code analysis and manipulation, as well as libraries, infrastructure, and real-world studies. The papers are expected to discuss engineering work artifacts that have NOT been published before as the main contribution. We encourage submissions that accompany papers in the Research Track.

What artifacts qualify as Engineering Track material?

• Tools: Software or hardware that facilitate source code analysis.
• Libraries: Reusable APIs and frameworks.
• Infrastructure: Projects that provide/facilitate access to data for reproducibility.
• Data: Reusable datasets for other researchers to reproduce the results.
• Real-world Studies: Studies that focus on how tools, libraries, infrastructure and data enable research.
• Engineering challenges: Identifying engineering challenges that remain unresolved and have impact on research in source-code analysis.

• Program transformation, refactoring, analysis, optimisation and measurement.
• Mining repositories, revisions and changes.
• Bad smell detection, clone management, and program comprehension.
• Concern, concept and feature localization and mining.
• Source-level testing, verification, bug detection and prediction, security vulnerability analysis.
• Natural language analysis of source code artifacts.

The submission length has a limit of 6 pages, with the expectation that authors use the space to discuss artifact motivation, design, and use cases in detail.

Each submission will be reviewed by members of the Engineering Track program committee. Authors of accepted papers will be required to present their contributions at the conference. All accepted Engineering Track papers will be published in the conference proceedings. The key criterion for acceptance is that the paper should (a) follow the above mentioned guidelines and (b) make an original contribution that can benefit practitioners in the field now and/or others designing and building artifacts for source code analysis and manipulation. The artifacts can range from an early research prototype to a polished deployed product. Papers about commercial products are welcome, as long as the guidelines described above are followed.

Videos and other demo material may be taken into account by reviewers as they review the paper, but the paper should be self contained. In order to preserve the anonymity of the reviewers, such material should be hosted on an anonymous public source, or made available in such a way that the track chairs can download them once and redistribute them to reviewers.

Proceedings

All accepted papers will appear in the proceedings which will be available through the IEEE Digital Library. Follow the general SCAM instructions on How to Submit. Additionally, this year ICSME, SCAM, and VISSOFT have joined forces and present a single Artifact Evaluation Track for all three venues. Authors of (short and long) papers accepted in the ICSME, SCAM, or VISSOFT 2021 Tracks are invited to submit their artifacts for evaluation to the ICSME 2021 Joint Artifact Evaluation Track.

Important dates

All submission dates are at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12).

Call for Replication and Negative Results Papers

The 21st IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM) will be hosting a Replication and Negative Result (RENE) track once again in 2021. This track provides a venue for researchers to submit papers reporting (1) replications of previous empirical studies (including controlled experiments, case studies, and surveys) and (2) important and relevant negative or null results (i.e., results that failed to show an effect, but help to eliminate useless hypotheses, therefore reorienting researchers on more promising research paths) related to source code analysis and manipulation (see list of topics in Technical Research Track).

Replications studies: The papers in this category must go beyond simply re-implementing an algorithm and/or re-running the artifacts provided by the original paper. Such submissions should apply the approach on at least a partially new data sets (open-source or proprietary). This also means that it is possible to use available infrastructures to conduct measurements and experiments but with different/extended datasets and different conditions, scenarios, etc. Replication studies can either strengthen the results of the original study by increasing external validity with additional data or provide new insights into the variables that may impact the results. A replication paper should clearly report on results that the authors were able to reproduce as well as on the aspects of the work that were irreproducible.

Negative results papers: In this category we seek papers that report on negative results. We seek negative results for all types of software engineering research related to source code and manipulation (qualitative, quantitative, case study, experiment, etc.). Negative results are important contributions to scientific knowledge because they allow us to prune our hypothesis space. As Walter Tichy writes, "Negative results, if trustworthy, are extremely important for narrowing down the search space. They eliminate useless hypotheses and thus reorient and speed up the search for better approaches."

Evaluation Criteria

Both Reproducibility Studies and Negative Results submissions will be evaluated according to the following standards:

• Depth and breadth of the empirical studies.
• Clarity of writing.
• Appropriateness of conclusions.
• Amount of useful, actionable insights.
• Deep discussion regarding the implications of the negative results or new results obtained with reproducibility studies.
• Availability of artifacts.
• Underlying methodological rigor and detailed description of procedures. For example, a negative result due primarily to misaligned expectations or due to lack of statistical power (small samples) is not a good submission. The negative result should be a result of a lack of effect, not lack of methodological rigor.
• Clear descriptions of the differences between the original setup and the one used in the study (for the case of reproducibility studies).

Most importantly, we expect that replication studies clearly point out the artifacts the study is built upon, and to provide the links to all the artifacts in the submission (the only exception will be given to those papers that reproduce the results on proprietary datasets that can not be publicly released).The paper should describe any changes to the original study design made during the replication, along with a justification for each change. The papers should contain a discussion section that compares the findings of the original and replication studies and describe the new knowledge gained from the replication along with any lessons learned from performing the replication. Partial replications are also welcome as long as the paper clearly states which parts of the study were replicated and which parts are new.

Submission Guidelines

Before submitting please follow the guidelines in How to Submit. Additionally, submissions must be original, in the sense that the findings and writing have not been previously published or under consideration elsewhere. Papers must not exceed 10 pages for the main text, inclusive of figures, tables, appendices; references only may be included on up to 2 additional pages. The paper must be clearly marked as a RENE paper. The papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format via EasyChair. Submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee, judging the paper on its novelty, quality, importance, evaluation, and scientific rigor. If the paper is accepted, at least one author must attend the conference and present the paper.

Important Dates

All submission dates are at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12).

Call for New Ideas and Emerging Results papers

After the successful first time having a New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) track at last year’s conference, the 21th IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM) will again host a NIER track. The goal of this track is to provide a place for researchers and practitioners to present, discuss, and polish early-stage research. This early-stage research should be innovative and have the potential to make a strong future impact on the research or practice of software engineering. However, as it concerns early-stage research, the NIER track does not require submissions to have a strong evaluation. Instead, submissions should contain preliminary results that indicate the future potential of the research as well as a discussion of the challenges which must be overcome in the pursuit of the given research goals. These challenges should act as both future research directions as well as topics which the authors feel require discussion within the community. The topics of interest for this track are the same as for the main research track and are listed below.

Topics of Interest

We welcome the submission of papers that describe original and significant work in the field of source code analysis and manipulation. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• abstract interpretation
• bad smell detection
• bug location and prediction
• clone detection
• concern, concept, and feature localization and mining
• decompilation
• energy efficient source code
• natural language analysis of source code artifacts
• program comprehension
• program slicing
• program transformation and refactoring
• repository, revision, and change analysis
• security vulnerability analysis
• source level metrics
• source level optimization
• source-level testing and verification
• static and dynamic analysis

REFLECTIONS

In addition to the mainstream submissions, as a new addition this year, we welcome Reflection papers which focuses on the mid-aged studies published in a partnered journal (TSE, IST, EMSE, JSS, TOSEM) in 3 to 8 years ago with the intent to discuss the current impact and implications. The purpose of this initiative is fostering innovation and transition of research results by systematically allowing authors to explore and evaluate the status quo of their research after a few years since its original publication.

Papers published between 2013 to 2019 in one of the partnered journals which related to one or more of the topics in this call for papers are eligible to submission.

Submission Instructions

Before submitting please follow the guidelines in How to Submit. Additionally, submissions must be original, in the sense that the findings and writing have not been previously published or under consideration elsewhere. Papers must not exceed 5 pages for the main text, which includes figures, tables, appendices, and references. The paper must be clearly marked as a NIER paper. The papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format via EasyChair. Submissions will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee, judging the paper on its novelty, quality, importance, evaluation, and scientific rigor. If the paper is accepted, at least one author must attend the conference and present the paper.

Evaluations

Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of their originality, the importance of their contribution, the challenges highlighted, and their potential future significance. In addition, reviewers are asked to consider the soundness, overall quality, clarity and consistency of presentation, and whether the submission appropriately contextualizes itself with respect to related work. Again, the NIER track does not require a full evaluation to be present within the submission. Preliminary data, as well as a discussion of the challenges and future research directions supported by this preliminary data, is encouraged.

Important Dates

All submission dates are at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12).

Artifact Evaluation

This year ICSME, SCAM, and VISSOFT have joined forces and present a single Artifact Evaluation Track for all three venues. The combined AE track will introduce the artifact evaluation for the first time to SCAM! Authors of (short and long) papers accepted in the ICSME, SCAM, or VISSOFT 2021 are invited to submit their artifacts for evaluation to the ICSME 2021 Joint Artifact Evaluation Track here.

Artifact Evaluation Important Dates

Steering Committee

• Árpád Beszédes, 2018 - 2021, 1st term. SC Chair
• Paige Rodeghero, 2019-2022, 1st term
• Johan Fabry, 2019-2022, 1st term
• Coen De Roover, 2020 - 2023, 2nd term
• Mark Hills, 2018 - 2021, 1st term
• Vadim Zaytsev, 2020 - 2023, 1st term

Charter

The International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis & Manipulation (SCAM) is governed by the steering committee following a community ratified steering committee charter (v1.2, adopted in 2012).

Organizing Committee

General Chair

• Alexander Serebrenik, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Research Track Program Co-Chairs

• Venera Arnaoudova, Washington State University, USA
• Ben Hermann, Technical University Dortmund, Germany

Engineering Track Program Co-Chairs

• Behnaz Hassanshahi, Oracle Labs, Australia
• Vadim Zaytsev, University of Twente, The Netherlands

RENE Track PC Co-chairs

• Bonita Sharif, University of Nebraska Lincoln, USA
• Heike Wehrheim, University of Oldenburg, Germany

New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) co-chairs

• Maleknaz Nayebi, York University, Canada
• Yannic Noller, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Most Influential Paper Co-chairs

• Arpad Beszedes, University of Szeged, Hungary
• Dawn Lawrie, Johns Hopkins University, USA

Publicity Chair

• Camelia Serban, Babes-Bolyai University, Romania

Finance Chair

• Dave Binkley, Loyola University Maryland, USA

Proceeding chair

• Matthieu Jimenez, SnT, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Scholarships Co-Chairs

• Dave Blinkley, Loyola University Maryland, USA
• Paige Rodeghero, Clemson University, USA

Social Media Co-Chairs

• Engineer Bainomugisha, Makerere University, Uganda
• Keheliya Gallaba, McGill University, Canada

Virtualization Co-chairs

• Sarah Fakhoury , Washington State University, USA
• Daniel Alencar da Costa, University of Otago, New Zealand

Web Chair

• Nathan Cassee, Eindhoven Unversity of Technology, The Netherlands

Program Committees

This page contains all of the Program Committee members for the various tracks of SCAM.

Research Track

Engineering Track

RENE Track

NIER Track

Registration

To register for SCAM 2021 please see the Registration page at the ICSME site here. Additionally, please be aware that this year SCAM has author scholarships, if you are interested you can find more information on page.

Accepted Papers for the Research Track

• Title: BoostNSift: A Query Boosting and Code Sifting Technique for Method Level Bug Localization by: Abdul Razzaq, Jim Buckley, James Patten, Muslim Chochlov and Ashish Rajendra Sai
• Title: How does Migrating to Kotlin Impact the Run-time Efficiency of Android Apps? by: Michael Peters, Gian Luca Scoccia and Ivano Malavolta
• Title: Jicer: Simplifying Cooperative Android App Analysis Tasks by: Felix Pauck and Heike Wehrheim
• Title: D-REX: Static Detection of Relevant Runtime Exceptions with Location Aware Transformer by: Farima Farmahinifarahani, Yadong Lu, Vaibhav Saini, Pierre Baldi and Cristina Lopes
• Title: A Precise Framework for Source-Level Control-Flow Analysis by: Idriss Riouak, Christoph Reichenbach, Görel Hedin, and Niklas Fors
• Title: Formal Definition and Automatic Generation of Semantic Metrics: An Empirical Study on Bug Prediction by: Ting Hu, Ran Mo, Pu Xiong, Zengyang Li and Qiong Feng
• Title: Fex: Assisted Extraction of Domain Features from C Programs by: Patrick Müller, Krishna Narasimhan and Mira Mezini
• Title: Improving Readability of Scratch Programs with Search-based Refactoring by: Felix Adler, Gordon Fraser, Eva Gründinger, Nina Körber, Simon Labrenz, Jonas Lerchenberger, Stephan Lukasczyk and Sebastian Schweikl
• Title: Empirical Comparison of Black-box Test Case Generation Tools for RESTful APIs by: Davide Corradini, Amedeo Zampieri, Michele Pasqua and Mariano Ceccato
• Title: Measuring source code conciseness across programming languages using compression by: Lodewijk Bergmans, Xander Schrijen, Edwin Ouwehand and Magiel Bruntink
• Title: Leveraging Unsupervised Learning to Summarize APIs Discussed in Stack Overflow by: Amirhossein Naghshzan, Latifa Guerrouj and Olga Baysal
• Title: Method Calls Frequency-Based Tie-Breaking Strategy For Software Fault Localization by: Qusay Idrees Sarhan, Béla Vancsics and Árpád Beszédes
• Title: What do Developers Discuss about Code Comments? by: Pooja Rani, Mathias Birrer, Sebastiano Panichella, Mohammad Ghafari and Oscar Nierstrasz
• Title: Towards Understanding Developers’ Machine-Learning Challenges: A Multi-Language Study on Stack Overflow by: Alaleh Hamidi, Giuliano Antoniol, Foutse Khomh, Massimiliano Di Penta and Mohammad Hamidi

Accepted Papers for the NIER Track

• Title: Towards a Taxonomy of Inline Code Comment Smells by: Elgun Jabrayilzade, Olcaytu Gürkan and Eray Tüzün
• Title: Naming Amplified Tests based on Improved Coverage by: Nienke Nijkamp, Carolin Brandt and Andy Zaidman
• Title: Removing Redundant Statements in Amplified Test Cases by: Wessel Oosterbroek, Carolin Brandt and Andy Zaidman
• Title: QSES: Quasi-Static Executable Slices by: Quentin Stievenart, Dave Binkley and Coen De Roover
• Title: Do Comments follow Commenting Conventions? A Case Study in Java and Python by: Pooja Rani, Suada Abukar, Nataliia Stulova, Alexandre Bergel and Oscar Nierstrasz
• Title: Towards a taxonomy for annotation of data science experiment repositories by: Shangeetha Sivasothy, Scott Barnett, Niroshinie Fernando, Rajesh Vasa, Roopak Sinha and Andrew Simmons
• Title: Linkage of Similar Code Snippets Assessed in the Micro Benchmark Service jsPerf by: Kazuya Saiki and Akinori Ihara

Accepted Papers for the RENE Track

• Title: An Experimental Analysis of Graph-Distance Algorithms for Comparing API Usages by: Sebastian Nielebock, Paul Blockhaus, Jacob Krüger and Frank Ortmeier

Accepted Papers for the Engineering Track

• Title: Modeling the Effects of Global Variables in Data-Flow Analysis for C/C++ by: Philipp Dominik Schubert, Florian Sattler, Fabian Schiebel, Ben Hermann and Eric Bodden
• Title: Into the Woods: Experiences from Building a Dataflow Analysis Framework for C/C++ by: Philipp Dominik Schubert, Ben Hermann, Eric Bodden and Richard Leer
• Title: SecuCheck: Engineering configurable taint analysis for software developers by: Goran Piskachev, Ranjith Krishnamurthy and Eric Bodden
• Title: CharmFL: A Fault Localization Tool for Python by: Qusay Idrees Sarhan, Attila Szatmári, Rajmond Toth and Árpád Beszédes
• Title: Unambiguity of Python Language Elements for Static Analysis by: Bence Nagy, Tibor Brunner and Zoltan Porkolab
• Title: eNYPD---Entry Point Detector by: Rodrigue Wete Nguempnang, Bernhard J. Berger and Karsten Sohr
• Title: SootFX: A Static Code Feature Extraction Tool for Java and Android by: Kadiray Karakaya and Eric Bodden
• Title: PyRef: Refactoring Detection in Python Projects by: Hassan Atwi, Bin Lin, Nikolaos Tsantalis, Yutaro Kashiwa, Yasutaka Kamei, Naoyasu Ubayashi, Gabriele Bavota and Michele Lanza

Keynotes

We are proud to announce the following two keynotes for SCAM 2021:

		Title: Collaborative Code Intelligence Abstract: Like artificial intelligence moved from its first wave relying on handcrafted knowledge to its second wave that emphasizes statistical approaches, code intelligence has in the last two decades embraced statistical approaches, most recently with a strong focus on deep learning, especially transformer models, hoping to adopt to code what these architectures have achieved in the area of NLP. Just like AI is expected to embark the third wave bringing together knowledge-based and statistical reasoning, the next generation of code intelligence systems will probably intertwine rule-based and statistical reasoning and will become multi-modal to include in the set of their analysis subjects non-code artefacts such as documents, developer forums, knowledge bases, and more - hence, the term collaborative code intelligence. This potential development raises research questions, on which the keynote will touch upon. Special focus will be put on architectural models for collaborative code intelligence. To this end, I will briefly present the architecture for collaborative classical code analyses of the OPAL framework and generalize from there to consider questions regarding the interplay between classical and learning-based code analysis methods. (How) can classical analyses approaches be used to improve the quality and robustness of learning-based code processing, or to automate data generation and/or curation? Is there a role for them as part of the optimization engine driving the adjustments of model parameters? Etc. Mira Mezini is a professor for computer science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. Her research is at the intersection of two fundamental computer science methods. First, she and her group design and implement new programming models and frameworks with the goal of maximizing the automation of technical (non-functional) concerns, so that developers creativity and engineering efforts are focussed on solutions for application domain concerns. Second, they design new methods and techniques for reasoning about software properties. There are obvious synergies between these two areas. One can design programming models dedicated to writing program analyses, so as to facilitate their design and implementation. On the other way around, program intelligence methods can be instrumental for ensuring the efficiency and safety of language concepts.
		Title: The inevitable emergence of write-only software Abstract: From the NATO conferences held 50 years ago that blessed its usage, the term "software engineering" has been used by the industry as shorthand for "keeping code easy to understand and evolve by teams." We often use the term in contrast with "computer science," generally understood as "the science (and art) of efficiently solving abstract computational problems." This goal has ultimately become the kingmaker of paradigms, programming languages, design patterns, architectures, and even code editors. Object-Orientation, Test-Driven Development, Agile Methods, refactoring, Continuous Integration, Domain-Driven Design are examples of what the industry has produced and consumed over decades, focused on building and maintaining increasingly larger codebases that can stand the test of time. In the last decade, I have seen a subtle yet increasingly more evident shift in priorities. Over the last decade, small companies with just a few engineers need to build systems that support hundreds of millions of users before it even has a working business model. After a long trial-and-error period, we have established things like microservices, serverless computing, and crash-only software as the most practical way to build this type of software. In this new mindset, the rules have changed. We don't build software to last—we don't know if our companies will last! So instead, we make software focusing on time-to-market and the ability to quickly adapt to new requirements as our businesses pivot, searching for the holy grail of product/market fit. In this session, I will walk you through how I perceive the changes that this industry has been through since I first started my career twenty years ago and what implications and new open questions this new reality brings to the field of software engineering. Phil Calçado is Senior Director of Engineering at SeatGeek, where he leads the team that builds the live events platform used by 44 million people worldwide. Before SeatGeek, he has led the platform team at Meetup/WeWork, worked on Linkerd—the pioneering Service Mesh, and headed product engineering for DigitalOcean and SoundCloud, both pioneers in the adoption of Microservices architectures.

Most Influential Paper award

SCAM 2021 is happy to announce that the most influencial paper award goes to "Lightweight Transformation and Fact Extraction with the srcML Toolkit" by Michael Collard, Michael Decker, and Jonathan Maletic originally published in SCAM 2011. The srcML toolkit is a widely-used fact extraction and source-code transformation toolkit, which continues to have a large impact on the software engineering research community because it is easy to use and continues to be maintained and updated. The first paper on the tool was published at SCAM 2011 and since then it has fostered a wide range of research innovations throughout software engineering and been awarded the Mining Software Repositories 2020 Foundational Contribution Award. Many SCAMers have used the tool in their own research, making this paper well deserving of the MIP award.

The Most Influential Paper Co-chairs are Arpad Beszedes and Dawn Lawrie.

Program

The below table contains the program of SCAM 2021. Please use the selection element to pick your own timezone. Note that by default UTC+0 is selected.

The link to the virtualization platform will be sent Saturday evening at the latest. For the program elements that take place on Zoom Ben Hermann has kindly prepared a background image. It can be downloaded here.

Monday, September 27, 2021
	Opening: Alexander Serebrenik, Ben Hermann, Venera Arnaoudova
	Testing (Session chair: Vadim Zaytsev)
	Research	Empirical Comparison of Black-box Test Case Generation Tools for RESTful APIs Davide Corradini, Amedeo Zampieri, Michele Pasqua and Mariano Ceccato
	NIER	Naming Amplified Tests based on Improved Coverage Nienke Nijkamp, Carolin Brandt and Andy Zaidman
	NIER	Removing Redundant Statements in Amplified Test Cases Wessel Oosterbroek, Carolin Brandt and Andy Zaidman
	NIER	Linkage of Similar Code Snippets Assessed in the Micro Benchmark Service jsPerf Kazuya Saiki and Akinori Ihara
	Social Event: SCAM Trivia
	Smells & Refactoring (Session chair: Ritu Kapur)
	Research	Improving Readability of Scratch Programs with Search-based Refactoring Felix Adler, Gordon Fraser, Eva Gründinger, Nina Körber, Simon Labrenz, Jonas Lerchenberger, Stephan Lukasczyk and Sebastian Schweikl
	NIER	Towards a Taxonomy of Inline Code Comment Smells Elgun Jabrayilzade, Olcaytu Gürkan and Eray Tüzün
	Engineering	PyRef: Refactoring Detection in Python Projects Hassan Atwi, Bin Lin, Nikolaos Tsantalis, Yutaro Kashiwa, Yasutaka Kamei, Naoyasu Ubayashi, Gabriele Bavota and Michele Lanza
	Bug Localization I (Session chair: Abu Naser Masud)
	Research	BoostNSift: A Query Boosting and Code Sifting Technique for Method Level Bug Localization Abdul Razzaq, Jim Buckley, James Patten, Muslim Chochlov and Ashish Rajendra Sai
	Research	Formal Definition and Automatic Generation of Semantic Metrics: An Empirical Study on Bug Prediction Ting Hu, Ran Mo, Pu Xiong, Zengyang Li and Qiong Feng
	Cooking and Eating with the PC Chair (Ben Hermann) If you are interested in participating please use the following link to prepare.
	Keynote (Phil Calçado)
	Bug Localization II (Session chair: Marie-Christine Jakobs)
	Research	Method Calls Frequency-Based Tie-Breaking Strategy For Software Fault Localization Qusay Idrees Sarhan, Béla Vancsics and Árpád Beszédes
	Engineering	CharmFL: A Fault Localization Tool for Python Qusay Idrees Sarhan, Attila Szatmári, Rajmond Toth and Árpád Beszédes
	Social: Ask Me Anything (Görel Hedin, Coen de Roover and Dave Binkley)
	Feature Extraction (Session chair: Ben Hermann)
	Research	Fex: Assisted Extraction of Domain Features from C Programs Patrick Müller, Krishna Narasimhan and Mira Mezini
	Engineering	SootFX: A Static Code Feature Extraction Tool for Java and Android Kadiray Karakaya and Eric Bodden
	Open Steering Committee Meeting
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
	Keynote (Mira Mezini)
	PL Studies (Session chair: Vadim Zaytsev)
	Research	How does Migrating to Kotlin Impact the Run-time Efficiency of Android Apps? Michael Peters, Gian Luca Scoccia and Ivano Malavolta
	Engineering	Unambiguity of Python Language Elements for Static Analysis Bence Nagy, Tibor Brunner and Zoltan Porkolab
	NIER	Towards a taxonomy for annotation of data science experiment repositories Shangeetha Sivasothy, Scott Barnett, Niroshinie Fernando, Rajesh Vasa, Roopak Sinha and Andrew Simmons
	Engineering Static Analyzers I (Session chair: Ralf Huuck)
	Research	A Precise Framework for Source-Level Control-Flow Analysis Idriss Riouak, Christoph Reichenbach, Görel Hedin, and Niklas Fors
	Engineering	Into the Woods: Experiences from Building a Dataflow Analysis Framework for C/C++ Philipp Dominik Schubert, Ben Hermann, Eric Bodden and Richard Leer
	Social: Mental Health in Academia
	PL Studies II (Session chair: Heike Wehrheim)
	Research	Measuring source code conciseness across programming languages using compression Lodewijk Bergmans, Xander Schrijen, Edwin Ouwehand and Magiel Bruntink
	Research	Towards Understanding Developers’ Machine-Learning Challenges: A Multi-Language Study on Stack Overflow Alaleh Hamidi, Giuliano Antoniol, Foutse Khomh, Massimiliano Di Penta and Mohammad Hamidi
	Engineering Static Analyzers II (Session chair: Behnaz Hassanshahi)
	Engineering	eNYPD---Entry Point Detector Rodrigue Wete Nguempnang, Bernhard J. Berger and Karsten Sohr
	Engineering	Modeling the Effects of Global Variables in Data-Flow Analysis for C/C++ Philipp Dominik Schubert, Florian Sattler, Fabian Schiebel, Ben Hermann and Eric Bodden
	Engineering	SecuCheck: Engineering configurable taint analysis for software developers Goran Piskachev, Ranjith Krishnamurthy and Eric Bodden
	Social: Bring your Pet(s)
	Documentation (Session chair: Gias Uddin)
	Research	Leveraging Unsupervised Learning to Summarize APIs Discussed in Stack Overflow Amirhossein Naghshzan, Latifa Guerrouj and Olga Baysal
	Research	What do Developers Discuss about Code Comments? Pooja Rani, Mathias Birrer, Sebastiano Panichella, Mohammad Ghafari and Oscar Nierstrasz
	NIER	Do Comments follow Commenting Conventions? A Case Study in Java and Python Pooja Rani, Suada Abukar, Nataliia Stulova, Alexandre Bergel and Oscar Nierstrasz
	Debugging (Session chair: Vadim Zaytsev)
	Research	Jicer: Simplifying Cooperative Android App Analysis Tasks Felix Pauck and Heike Wehrheim
	Research	D-REX: Static Detection of Relevant Runtime Exceptions with Location Aware Transformer Farima Farmahinifarahani, Yadong Lu, Vaibhav Saini, Pierre Baldi and Cristina Lopes
	NIER	QSES: Quasi-Static Executable Slices Quentin Stievenart, Dave Binkley and Coen De Roover
	RENE	An Experimental Analysis of Graph-Distance Algorithms for Comparing API Usages Sebastian Nielebock, Paul Blockhaus, Jacob Krüger and Frank Ortmeier
	Most Influential Paper Award
	Closing: Alexander Serebrenik, Ben Hermann, Venera Arnaoudova

Fun

SCAM has always maintained the tradition of giving participants a special SCAM mug. You can see the mugs of some of the past editions in the slideshow below. This year, SCAM will be virtual and conference participants will receive a special gift designed by Rita Bártfai.

2001, Florence, Italy

2002, Montreal, Canada

2003, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2004, Chicago, USA

2005, Budapest, Hungary

2006, Philadelphia, USA

2007, Paris, France

2008, Beijing, China

2009, Edmonton, Canada

2010, Timișoara, Romania

2011, Williamsburg, USA

2012, Riva del Garda, Italy

2013, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

2014, Victoria, Canada

2015, Bremen, Germany

2016, Raleigh, USA

2017, Shanghai, China

2018, Madrid, Spain

2019, Cleveland, USA

2020, Adelaide, Australia / Online

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Supporters

For SCAM 2021 we are proud to have the support of two leading companies in Software Engineering, GrammaTech and Facebook. We would like to thank both GrammaTech and Facebook for their support, as they make it possible to host SCAM!

About GrammaTech

GrammaTech is a small company that was originally founded in Ithaca New York in 1988 as a spin-off of Cornell University. We do both contract research and develop commercial products. Our team of researchers comprises 20 PhD-qualified scientists who conduct research projects that are mostly funded by various US government agencies. These are primarily oriented towards cybersecurity, and touch on software analysis, transformation, monitoring and autonomic functions. Our most successful commercial product to date is CodeSonar, an advanced static analysis tool for finding serious software defects that is sold mostly to customers in embedded safety-critical industries. A new product named CodeSentry is a SaaS product to find N-day security vulnerabilities in software binaries. GrammaTech welcomes inquiries from those interested in joining our team; see the following page.

About Facebook

At Facebook, our mission of giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together requires constant innovation. That’s where research comes in.

We believe the most interesting research questions are derived from real-world problems. Our expert teams of scientists and engineers work quickly and collaboratively to build smarter, more meaningful experiences on a global scale by solving the most challenging technology problems, as well as look toward the future.

SCAM Author Scholarships

Thanks to generous support from Grammatech and Facebook, SCAM is pleased to offer scholarships for authors who are (a) undergraduate and graduate students, (b) participants from low- or lower-middle income countries, (c) first-time participants, and (d) members of groups traditionally underrepresented in the SCAM community.

• The list of low- and lower-middle income countries is available here.
• Such groups as women, blacks, an LGBTIQ+ have traditionally been underrepresented in computing in general, and in the SCAM community, in particular. This list is not and cannot be exhaustive.

Applications for the author scholarships are closed, and the notifications have been sent.

SCAM Participation Scholarships

Thanks to generous support from Grammatech and Facebook, SCAM is pleased to offer scholarships for participants who are (a) undergraduate and graduate students, (b) participants from low- or lower-middle income countries, (c) first-time participants, and (d) members of groups traditionally underrepresented in the SCAM community.

• The list of low- and lower-middle income countries is available here.
• Such groups as women, blacks, an LGBTIQ+ have traditionally been underrepresented in computing in general, and in the SCAM community, in particular. This list is not and cannot be exhaustive.

Please apply for the scholarship on EasyChair. Deadline is September 20th and notifications will be sent by September 22nd.