Journal of Software: Evolution and Process (Special Issue on Microservice and AIOps)

本专刊与2021年CCF中国软件大会(CCF Chinasoft 2021)合作。投稿本专刊并通过第一轮评审的国内论文作者需要注册参加本次大会并在“微服务与智能化运维”论坛上进行论文报告交流。

Microservice architecture has been the mainstream of cloud native software applications. Nowadays, more and more companies have chosen to migrate from the so-called monolithic architecture to microservice architecture. Industrial microservice systems can be extremely complex. Typically, a large-scale microservice system can include hundreds to thousands of services and is complicated due to the extremely small grained services and their complex interactions and the complex configurations of the runtime environments. Moreover, a microservice system can be highly dynamic: service instances can be dynamically created and destroyed and the invocations of the same service can be accomplished by different instances. The complexity and dynamism of microservice systems pose great and unique challenges to microservice design, development, testing, debugging, deployment, operation, maintenance, and evolution.

The nature of microservice systems calls for stronger and more intelligent support of IT operations. Therefore, AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations), which applies artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance IT operations, has been a necessary capability of microservice teams. AIOps collects and uses a large amount of operations data (e.g., logs, traces, and metrics) to monitor the runtime operations of the system, identify significant events related to performance and availability issues, diagnose root cause, and even resolve the issues automatically. AIOps is still in its infancy and requires academia and industry to keep exploring the research and practices of AIOps.

The Special issue on microservice and AIOps is an initiative to bring this emerging area and related topics to the attention of the communities of software and systems engineering. The focus of this special issue is to provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners in academia and industry to present novel applications and areas of research as well as new empirical results and insights, and to present new techniques and tool support for advancing microservice and AIOps and its impact. In this special issue we both invite extended versions of selected papers from collaborating workshops, and solicit novel submissions related to microservice and AIOps.

The list of topics includes but not limited to:

1. Microservice decomposition and architecture design

2. Microservice development and DevOps

3. Microservice testing and debugging

4. Microservice deployment and updating

5. Microservice logging and tracing

6. Incident prediction of microservice systems

7. Root cause localization of microservice faults and failures

8. Runtime monitoring and visualization of microservice systems

9. Runtime adaptation and optimization of microservice systems

10. Microservice maintenance and evolution

11. Microservice infrastructure (e.g., container, service mesh)

12. Serverless and FaaS (Function as a Service)

Important Dates

Submission deadline: July 15, 2021

First notification: October 15, 2021

Revision submission: December 15, 2021

Notification of acceptance: February 15, 2022

Submission Guidelines

1. Authors should prepare their manuscript according to the Guide for Authors of the Software: Evolution and Process. The submission site is

http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jsme

2. Please select “Microservice and AIOps” in the submission system. All the papers will be peer-reviewed following the Software: Evolution and Process reviewing procedures. Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere. If the submission is an extended work of a previously published conference /workshop paper, you must submit a cover letter/document detailing (1) the "Summary of Differences" between the Conference/workshop paper and extended version paper, (2) a clear list of "new and original" ideas/contributions in the extended version paper (identifying sections where they are proposed/presented), (3) confirmation of the percentage of new material (at least 30%), and (4) the previously published conference/workshop paper.

Guest Editors

Xin Peng, PhD, Corresponding Guest Editor

Professor and Deputy Dean

School of Computer Science, Fudan University

Email: pengxin@fudan.edu.cn

Tao Xie, PhD

Chair Professor

Department of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University

Email: taoxie@pku.edu.cn

Dongmei Zhang, PhD

Distinguished Scientist of Microsoft

Assistant Managing Director, Microsoft Research Asia

Email: dongmeiz@microsoft.com

Qingshan Li, PhD

Professor

School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University

Email: qshli@mail.xidian.edu.cn

Julia Rubin, PhD

Assistant Professor

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of British Columbia | Vancouver Campus

Email: mjulia@ece.ubc.ca

Guest Editors Short CV

Dr. Xin Pengis a Professor and deputy dean of School of Computer Science, at Fudan University, China. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Fudan University in 2006. He is deputy director of CCF (China Computer Federation) Technical Committee on Software Engineering and steering committee member of ICSME (2017-2020). He is a Co-Editor of Journal of Software: Evolution and Process and on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Empirical Software Engineering, and Chinese Journal of Software. He leads the CodeWisdom Team at Fudan University, which is targeting at developing intelligent software engineering techniques and tools for software development, maintenance, and operation. His work won the Best Paper Award of ICSM 2011, the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award of ASE 2018, the IEEE TCSE Distinguished Paper Award of ICSME 2018/2019/2020, and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Best Paper award for 2018.

Dr. Tao Xieis a Chair Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University, China. His research interests are in software engineering. He received an NSF CAREER Award, an IEEE CS TCSE Distinguished Service Award, a Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award, a Microsoft Research Software Engineering Innovation Foundation (SEIF) Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, a Facebook Testing and Verification Research Award, an IBM Jazz Innovation Award, and three-time IBM Faculty Awards. He was the Program Chair of 2015 ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA) and is a Program Co-Chair of 2021 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). He is a co-Editor-in-Chief of the Wiley journal of Software Testing, Verification and Reliability (STVR). He serves/served on the editorial boards of TSE, TOSEM, TOIT, and CACM. He was selected by Lero as a David Lorge Parnas Fellow in 2019. He was selected as an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2015, an IEEE Fellow in 2018, and an AAAS Fellow in 2019.

Dr. Dongmei Zhang is Distinguished Scientist of Microsoft and the Assistant Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), leading the research areas of data intelligence, knowledge computing, information visualization, and software engineering. Dr. Zhang founded the Software Analytics Group in MSRA in 2009. Since then she has been leading the group to research software analytics technologies. Her group collaborates closely with multiple product teams in Microsoft and has developed and deployed software analytics tools that have created high business impact. In recent years, Dr. Zhang and her teams have expanded the research and impact into the business intelligence area, and helped Microsoft products establish technology leadership in the direction of Smart Data Discovery. Dr. Zhang holds a Ph.D. degree in Robotics from the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Qingshan Li is the academic leader of the provincial key first-level discipline “software engineering” of Xidian University which is recognized by the Ministry of Education, and serves as the director of the Intelligent Software and System Institute of Xidian University. And he led the declaration and currently serves as the director of the Xi'an Intelligent Software Engineering Key Laboratory. In addition, Professor Li is a senior member of CCF, a member of CCF Technical Committee on Software Engineering and Committee on Big Data, and a member of CCF Working Committee for Elite Young Professionals. His main research directions are Agent-oriented Software Engineering (AOSE), Software Evolution and Adaptation, Microservice Architecture Systems and Container Technology, Intelligent Software Engineering, and Big Data, etc. Professor Li has presided more than 40 national-level projects, such as the National Key Research and Development Program, National High-tech R&D program of China (863 program), National Natural Science Foundation of China, etc. Professor Li’s research results have been organized in academic papers and published at the top conferences and journals in the field of software engineering such as ICSE, ESEC/FSE, ICSME, SANER, Artificial Intelligence Review, Journal of Computational Information Systems, SCIENCE CHINA, Journal of Software, and Journal of Computer Science. He has published two academic books about AOSE, authorized more than 20 National Invention Patents, and won the honorary title of the National Level Teaching Team, the Shaanxi Higher Education Teaching Achievement Award, and the Shaanxi University Science and Technology Award.

Dr. Julia Rubin is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, Canada and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, USA. Earlier, Dr. Rubin spent almost 10 years in industry, working for IBM Research, where she was a research staff member and a research group manager. Dr. Rubin’s research interests are in software engineering, software security, and in reliability of software and AI systems. Her recent work in these areas won several Distinguished and Best Paper awards, including ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards at ISSTA'18 and ASE'15, and was runner-up for Facebook's Internet Defense Prize at the USENIX Security Symposium'14. She serves on program committees of several major conferences in Software Engineering, such as ICSE, ASE, FSE, and co-chaired the program committee of FASE'17, SPLC'14, ECMFA'14. She will co-chair the program committee of ASE in 2022.