Introduction to the special issue on software engineering in practice

The ever-increasing complexity of software and rapidly changing development environments continues to drive the evolution of new technologies, techniques, and tools. This special issue, Software Engineering in Practice, provides the software engineering community with a valuable collection of current, high-quality research articles that explore topics driven by real problems in the industry. The inspiration for this special issue has drawn upon the ICSE Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE SEIP 2018) Track,* part of the Industry Program at the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering.† The ICSE SEIP Track provides a premier venue for researchers and practitioners to discuss innovations and solutions to concrete software engineering problems. The Guest Co-editor team for this special issue is an international collaboration involving the co-organizers of the ICSE SEIP 2018 Track, Frances Paulisch and Jan Bosch, and an editor of the Journal of Software: Practice and Experience‡ (JSPE), Kendra M. L. Cooper. Methodology The Call for Papers was designed to encourage submissions that presented novel and innovative ideas that broadly spanned the software engineering discipline—ideas that provided rigorously validated solutions for real problems encountered by practitioners. In order to promote an inclusive environment, the call was broadly disseminated as an open call; it was advertised on the JSPE and the ICSE SEIP 2018 websites, established software engineering newsgroups (eg, SE World), and conference announcement sites (eg, WikiCFP), in addition to numerous professional and social media platforms. The call required submissions be original manuscripts that had not been previously published and were also not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Submissions of research article, survey papers, short communication, and extended conference papers were welcome; extended conference papers were required to include at least 30% additional novel contributions. The response from the software engineering community was enthusiastic: the special issue received 41 submissions. Submissions featured international collaborations from researchers in academia and industry, case studies from industry, and the use of open source data sets and systems provided by the broader community. The submissions were reviewed according to the JSPE standards, with a goal of publishing the online version of the articles in a timely fashion. Ultimately, nine articles were selected for the special issue. Overviews of these accepted manuscripts are presented below, organized into three groups. Overview of the collection Novel contributions in the area of data analytics are explored in some of the papers in the special issue. Astekin et al present a framework for automated analysis of large system logs to detect anomalies. Karna et al employ data mining methods on the software engineering process itself and use these techniques for effort estimation. Marijan et al introduce a novel learning algorithm to optimize the continuous integration and testing practice. In addition, Martens et al investigate the problem of data migration between legacy and newly developed IT systems. Research problems centered on mobile application code are the focus of two papers in the special issue. Ochoa et al apply static analysis techniques on Android applications to detect context leaks in the code. Wang et al also study mobile applications; these authors report on approaches to obfuscate mobile application code with the intent of impeding efforts to reverse engineering applications. Techniques based on the model-driven development paradigm are presented in several of the papers in the special issue. Nooraei and Ajoudanian present a framework to ensure the on-going integrity of the transformation between the platform-independent model (PIM) and the corresponding platform-specific model (PSM) of a system via regression