Many prominent tech companies have embraced an analytics-driven culture to help improve their decision making. Analytics include methods of gathering, preprocessing, transforming and modelling raw data with the purpose of highlighting useful information and drawing conclusions from it. Software analytics are used to leverage large volumes of data from multiple sources to help practitioners make informed decisions about their projects. While analytics solutions demonstrated promising results, there are many challenges left concerned with developing, integrating, adopting analytics into software development processes.

The fourth International Workshop on Software Analytics (2018) aims at providing a common venue for researchers and practitioners across software engineering, data mining and mining software repositories research domains to share new approaches and emerging results in developing and validating analytics rich solutions, as well as adopting analytics to software development and maintenance processes to better inform their everyday decisions. The goals of the workshop are to discuss progress on software analytics, data mining and analysis; to gather empirical evidence on the use and effectiveness of analytics; and to identify priorities for a research agenda. The workshop invites both academic researchers and industrial practitioners for an exchange of ideas and collaboration.

The main theme of the SWAN 2018 workshop is to exchange ideas from both academia and industry to form a consolidated view regarding how good existing software analytics and tools are and how to benefit from them for different software development and maintenance activities. This year we are announcing a specilaized theme "responsible software science" (aka what extra would we have to add to your tools to make our systems ethical?) for submissions. However, we also accept papers on general topics of software analytics. The topics of discussion include (but not limited to) the following:

1. •Applications of software and data analytics to support decision making;
   

2. •Data-driven approaches for data exploration and analysis;
   

3. •Predictive analytics;
   

4. •Analytics in model-based development;
   

5. •Web analytics, development analytics, business intelligence tools, Hadoop tools;
   

6. •Quantitative vs. qualitative analytics;
   

7. •Large-scale data mining, analysis and analytics;
   

8. •Software analytics for various stakeholders (e.g., managers vs. developers);
   

9. •Methods of integrating data from multiple sources (applications, interfaces, mobile apps);
   

10. •Empirical studies on how software analytics are used in practice and their effectiveness;
    

11. •Negative results ("what did not work") when adopting software analytics, and experience reports;
    

12. •Identification of open research challenges and proposed solutions.
    

SWAN 2018 invites contributions in the form of short (4-page) and full (7-page) papers both research papers or industry experience reports. All submissions should describe unpublished work and must have been neither previously accepted for publication nor concurrently submitted for review in another journal, book, conference, or workshop. Submissions can be position papers, research papers, studies, experience or practice reports.

Submission site: SWAN 2018 EasyChair

All submissions must conform to the ACM proceedings formatting guidelines, see and must not exceed 7 pages (including all text, figures). If the submission is accepted, at least one author must attend the workshop and present the paper in order for the paper to be published in the ACM DL proceedings. Paper submissions should be in PDF format, uploaded to SWAN 2018 EasyChair by July 27, 2018 (AoE Time). Please read below important notes on the double-blind review process.

SWAN-18 will use a double-blind review process to process submissions.

Double-blind review

To facilitate this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give away their identity:

1. •Authors should remove names and affiliations under the title within the manuscript.
   

2. •Use the third person to refer to work the authors have previously undertaken, e.g., replace any phrases like “as we have shown before” with “as it has been shown before [Anonymous, 2007]”.
   

3. •Ensure figures do not contain any affiliation related identifiers.
   

4. •Do not eliminate essential self-references or other references but limit self-references only to papers that are relevant for those reviewing the submitted paper.
   

5. •Cite papers published by the Author in the text as follows: “[Anonymous, 2007]”.
   

6. •For blinding in the reference list: “[Anonymous 2007] Details omitted for double-blind reviewing.”
   

7. •Remove references to funding sources.
   

8. •Do not include acknowledgements in the original sub-
   mission.
   

9. •Remove any identifying information, including author names, from file names and ensure document proper- ties are also anonymized.
   

10. •Do not link to any repository or on-line archive.
    

Note that authors, if they wish, may also post their submission, with names, links, full citations, acknowledgements, etc., to public domain paper servers such as arxiv.org. Our reviewers will be specifically instructed to not to search that cite for the papers they are reviewing. That said, authors wishing to increase the probability that their double-blind identify will not be revealed, might consider not posting to sites such as arxiv.org.

1. •Paper submission: Extended until August 3rd (July 27), 2018 (AoE Time)
   

2. •Author notification: August 24, 2018
   

3. •Camera-ready: September 18, 2018 (AoE Time)
   

4. •Workshop day: Monday November 05, 2018