SCAM 2022 will be held in Limassol, Cyprus, co-located with ICSME 2022.
The aim of the International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis & Manipulation (SCAM) is to bring together researchers and practitioners working on theory, techniques and applications which concern analysis and/or manipulation of the source code of computer systems. While much attention in the wider software engineering community is properly 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 behaviour of the system. The analysis and manipulation of source code thus remains a pressing concern.
For the purpose of clarity ‘source code’ is taken to mean any fully executable description of a software system. It is therefore so-construed as to include machine code, very high level languages and executable graphical representations of systems. The term ‘analysis’ is taken to mean any automated or semi automated procedure which takes source code and yields insight into its meaning. The term ‘manipulation’ is taken to mean any automated or semi-automated procedure which takes and returns source code.
Submitted papers should describe original, unpublished, and significant work and must not have been previously accepted for publication nor be concurrently submitted for review in another journal, book, conference,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.
Papers must not exceed 12 pages (the last 2 pages can be used for references only) and 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 and should be submitted electronically in PDF format
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.
We follow a double-blind reviewing process, and every submission must adhere to the following rules:
If the program chairs find that authors did not respect the rules of double-blind review they can decide to (desk) reject the paper.
This year, likewise past 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 SCAM 2022 are invited to submit their artifacts for evaluation to the ICSME 2022 Joint Artifact Evaluation Track.
All accepted papers, presented at the conference, will appear in the proceedings which will be available through the IEEE Digital Library.
Extended versions of papers accepted at one of the SCAM 2022 tracks will be invited for submission in Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, Wiley.
The 22nd IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2022) 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 2022 solicits high quality paper submissions.
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:
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.
Papers must not exceed 12 pages (the last 2 pages can be used for references only) and 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 and should be submitted electronically in PDF format. 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. 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.
We follow a double-blind reviewing process. Submitted papers must adhere to the following rules:
If the program chairs find that authors did not respect the rules of double-blind review they can decide to (desk) reject the paper.
This year, likewise past 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 SCAM 2022 are invited to submit their artifacts for evaluation to the ICSME 2022 Joint Artifact Evaluation Track.
All accepted papers will appear in the proceedings which will be available through the IEEE Digital Library.
Extended versions of papers accepted at one of the SCAM 2022 tracks will be invited for submission in Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, Wiley.
All submission dates are at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12).
| Abstract Submission: | June 17th, 2022 |
| Paper Submission: | June 23th, 2022 |
| Author Notification: | July 25th, 2022 |
| Camera Ready: | August 1st, 2022 |
T.B.A.
The 22nd IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM) will be hosting a Replication and Negative Result (RENE) track once again in 2022. 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."
Artifact Evaluation Track and ROSE Festival: Authors of accepted papers will have the option to submit to the Artifact Evaluation Track that will award badges that will be displayed in those papers based on their contributions to open science. For details about the evaluation criteria and the artifact badges please visit here.
Both Reproducibility Studies and Negative Results submissions will be evaluated according to the following standards:
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.
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.
All submission dates are at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12).
| Abstract Submission: | July 1st, 2022 |
| Paper Submission: | July 8th, 2022 |
| Author Notification: | July 26th, 2022 |
| Camera Ready: | August 2nd, 2022 |
After the successful edition of the New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) track at last year’s conference, the 22nd IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2022) will again host a NIER track. This track aims to provide a place for researchers and practitioners to present, discuss, and polish early-stage research. This early-stage research should be innovative with 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.
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:
Before submitting please follow the guidelines in How to Submit. The submissions must follow the rules of the double-blind reviewing process. 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, including figures, tables, appendices, and references. The paper must be marked as a NIER track paper. The papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format via EasyChair. At least three program committee members will review each submission, judging 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.
Submissions will be evaluated based on 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 complete evaluation. Preliminary data and a discussion of the challenges and future research directions supported by this preliminary data are encouraged.
Authors of (short and long) papers accepted in the SCAM 2022 are also invited to submit their artifacts to the ICSME 2022 Joint Artifact Evaluation Track.
The NIER track chairs deserve the right to award the best paper(s) of the track. In any case, the best papers of the track will be invited for submission in the Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, Wiley. The extended papers must report a considerable amount of new material with respect to the NIER version. These will go through the reviewing process of the Journal and should meet its quality and novelty requirements for acceptance.
All submission dates are at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12).
| Abstract Submission: | July 1st, 2022 |
| Paper Submission: | July 8th, 2022 |
| Author Notification: | July 26th, 2022 |
| Camera Ready: | August 2ns, 2022 |
Csaba Nagy, Università della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland) - csaba.nagy@usi.ch
Fabio Palomba, University of Salerno (Italy) - fpalomba@unisa.it
T.B.A.
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).
T.B.A.
To register for SCAM 2022 please see the Registration page at the ICSME site here.
We are proud to announce the following two keynotes for SCAM 2021:
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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. |
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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. |
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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.
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 | |||
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Opening: Alexander Serebrenik, Ben Hermann, Venera Arnaoudova |
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| 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 |
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| NIER |
Naming Amplified Tests based on Improved Coverage 
Nienke Nijkamp, Carolin Brandt and Andy Zaidman |
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| NIER |
Removing Redundant Statements in Amplified Test Cases 
Wessel Oosterbroek, Carolin Brandt and Andy Zaidman |
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| NIER |
Linkage of Similar Code Snippets Assessed in the Micro Benchmark Service jsPerf
Kazuya Saiki and Akinori Ihara |
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Social Event: SCAM Trivia |
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| 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 |
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| NIER |
Towards a Taxonomy of Inline Code Comment Smells
Elgun Jabrayilzade, Olcaytu Gürkan and Eray Tüzün |
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| Engineering |
PyRef: Refactoring Detection in Python Projects
Hassan Atwi, Bin Lin, Nikolaos Tsantalis, Yutaro Kashiwa, Yasutaka Kamei, Naoyasu Ubayashi, Gabriele Bavota and Michele Lanza |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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Cooking and Eating with the PC Chair (Ben Hermann) If you are interested in participating please use the following link to prepare. |
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Keynote (Phil Calçado) |
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| 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 |
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| Engineering |
CharmFL: A Fault Localization Tool for Python
Qusay Idrees Sarhan, Attila Szatmári, Rajmond Toth and Árpád Beszédes |
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Social: Ask Me Anything (Görel Hedin, Coen de Roover and Dave Binkley) |
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| Feature Extraction (Session chair: Ben Hermann) | |||
| Research |
Fex: Assisted Extraction of Domain Features from C Programs
Patrick Müller, Krishna Narasimhan and Mira Mezini |
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| Engineering |
SootFX: A Static Code Feature Extraction Tool for Java and Android
Kadiray Karakaya and Eric Bodden |
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| Open Steering Committee Meeting | |||
| Tuesday, September 28, 2021 | |||
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Keynote (Mira Mezini) |
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| 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 |
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| Engineering |
Unambiguity of Python Language Elements for Static Analysis
Bence Nagy, Tibor Brunner and Zoltan Porkolab |
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| NIER |
Towards a taxonomy for annotation of data science experiment repositories
Shangeetha Sivasothy, Scott Barnett, Niroshinie Fernando, Rajesh Vasa, Roopak Sinha and Andrew Simmons |
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| 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 |
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| Engineering |
Into the Woods: Experiences from Building a Dataflow Analysis Framework for C/C++
Philipp Dominik Schubert, Ben Hermann, Eric Bodden and Richard Leer |
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Social: Mental Health in Academia |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| Engineering Static Analyzers II (Session chair: Behnaz Hassanshahi) | |||
| Engineering |
eNYPD---Entry Point Detector
Rodrigue Wete Nguempnang, Bernhard J. Berger and Karsten Sohr |
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| 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 |
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| Engineering |
SecuCheck: Engineering configurable taint analysis for software developers
Goran Piskachev, Ranjith Krishnamurthy and Eric Bodden |
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Social: Bring your Pet(s) |
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| Documentation (Session chair: Gias Uddin) | |||
| Research |
Leveraging Unsupervised Learning to Summarize APIs Discussed in Stack Overflow
Amirhossein Naghshzan, Latifa Guerrouj and Olga Baysal |
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| Research |
What do Developers Discuss about Code Comments?
Pooja Rani, Mathias Birrer, Sebastiano Panichella, Mohammad Ghafari and Oscar Nierstrasz |
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| NIER |
Do Comments follow Commenting Conventions? A Case Study in Java and Python
Pooja Rani, Suada Abukar, Nataliia Stulova, Alexandre Bergel and Oscar Nierstrasz |
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| Debugging (Session chair: Vadim Zaytsev) | |||
| Research |
Jicer: Simplifying Cooperative Android App Analysis Tasks
Felix Pauck and Heike Wehrheim |
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| Research |
D-REX: Static Detection of Relevant Runtime Exceptions with Location Aware Transformer
Farima Farmahinifarahani, Yadong Lu, Vaibhav Saini, Pierre Baldi and Cristina Lopes |
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| NIER |
QSES: Quasi-Static Executable Slices
Quentin Stievenart, Dave Binkley and Coen De Roover |
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| RENE |
An Experimental Analysis of Graph-Distance Algorithms for Comparing API Usages
Sebastian Nielebock, Paul Blockhaus, Jacob Krüger and Frank Ortmeier |
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Most Influential Paper Award |
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Closing: Alexander Serebrenik, Ben Hermann, Venera Arnaoudova |
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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
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!
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.
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.
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.
Applications for the author scholarships are closed, and the notifications have been sent.
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.
Please apply for the scholarship on EasyChair. Deadline is September 20th and notifications will be sent by September 22nd.
