IEE Software Special Issue

Grigori Melnik at U Calgary has conceived a special issue of IEE Software magazine, focused on Test-Driven Development, and has invited me to be the industry editor, while he will serve as the academic editor. We are pleased to report that IEEE has agreed to publish the issue and now we're soliciting your articles for that issue, with a submission deadline of December 1, 2006. The official submission window opens September 15th, but feel free to get in touch with either of us informally before that time.

The official announcement of the issue can be found on the IEEE Software Editorial Calendar. Please visit that site and treat it as the official statement of dates, times, and content. This article is an announcement and elaboration.

We are interested, as the announcement says, in state of the art or state of the practice articles. Both practical and research articles are welcome and are solicited. The topics of interest include:

• good practices, patterns and anti-patterns for TDD
• TDD in various industrial contexts (for example, information systems, the Web, and embedded systems)
• dealing with large systems and scaling TDD
• TDD and software maintenance
• management challenges in implementing TDD
• emergent design in TDD
• economics (effectiveness) of TDD
• introducing the discipline of TDD to developers with various levels of experience, socio-cognitive aspects
• test-first for complex GUIs

If you have something in mind that seems outside the list provided, but that definitely has to do with TDD, drop us a note and we'll see whether your idea fits in. It probably will.

Submissions must be made through the IEEE site as shown on the IEEE calendar page. For questions, contact Grigori and/or Ron at these addresses. If you haven't heard back from me within a day, you can assume something has gone wrong and try again. Grigori might be a bit slower, but he's far more reliable.

We're excited to have been given permission to edit this issue, and look forward to lots of excellent papers. Let's have one of them be yours!