Software as a service (SaaS) – a framework for encapsulating and delivering applications as services has been a very popular architecture of choice for many business applications. Instead of installing and maintaining software, services are accessed on the cloud, avoiding complex and costly software and hardware management. The framework has been a great success primarily due to how it allows for cost-effective modular service requirements decomposition and modular service composition during the development, operation, maintenance, and evolution of the encapsulated software and the underlying computing platform.

But despite the successes and unparalleled popularity, next-generation of software services are increasingly pressured to become more than just encapsulated code with a service interface. Demands abound for such services to be context and situation-aware, driven by behaviors observed and captured from both the environment and humans, intrinsically modifying their service delivery behavior accordingly. They are also expected to be self-aware and autonomous, sentient of their own offerings and intelligent enough to reason about other opportunities that can be afforded by teaming and bonding with other self-aware services. And with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), services are further required to be ultra-mobile, ultra-fine-grained, ultra-trustworthy, and ultra-intelligent, capable of learning from their own data as well as their peers. Such IoT services must survive the presence of unavoidable uncertainties from the data, the analytics, and the environment, and must cope with unpredictable ambiguities brought about by end-user interactions.

Moreover, human-centric concerns in service design are expanding beyond the traditional focus to include developers, operators and end-users, alike, in the end-to-end process of developing, deploying, managing and evolving such services as the underlying technologies change and evolve.

Next generation software services are therefore anticipated to be the superheroes that, in addition to encapsulating service code, do somehow apply state-of-the-art techniques that cut across the areas of service computing, machine learning, software engineering, pervasive computing, IoT, dependable computing, psychophysiological or brain science, autonomics, among others, to support the emerging cutting-edge applications of the future. Recognizing the need for a disruptive approach to enabling next generation software services, the IEEE World Congress on Services has taken a first step by dedicating a special symposium organized by academic and industrial leaders from the software engineering and services computing communities to chart a way forward. The International Symposium on Advances in Software Services Engineering which was held in 2021 and 2022, has concluded with a set of recommendations, which is a cross-cutting declaration and a manifesto of a new field of study named Software Service Engineering (SSE), based on the prevalent body of knowledge and professional practices of software engineering methods and tools, as well as advances in the other disciplines as described above. Based on these recommendations, the International Conference on Software Services Engineering (SSE) was established as a replacement of the Congress’ previous Conference on Service Computing (IEEE SCC). It was ingugurated in 2023 in Chicago, USA, to further establish this field and to organize the participation and contributions of its constituent R&D communities.

SSE welcomes original research and bold ideas that fall under the following themes, but other innovative and novel themes that contribute to evolving and empowering software services are also encouraged:

Human in SSE

• Human-Behavior-Driven Requirements Engineering for Software Services
• HumaI
• Persuasive Software Services for Human-in-SSE Systems

IoT: Context Awareness & Autonomy

• Context-Aware DevOps Platforms for Software Services
• Microservices-Based Autonomous IoT Service Frameworks
• Harmonizing Autonomous Services with Ambiguities and Uncertainties
• Integration and Interoperability of Software Services

NextGen SSE

• Trustworthiness-by-Design Architecture for Software Services
• AI-Enabled Software Service Engineering
• Software Service Engineering for Responsible AI
• Software Service Engineering based on LLM
• Digital Twins for Software Services Engineering

Intelligent Operations

• Manageability-Preserved Dynamic Composition of Individually Administered Microservices
• DevOps and service engineering
• Maintenance of service-oriented systems
• Intent-centric Software Service Management

Industrial SSE

• Applications and case studies
• Tools
• Practical Experience