# Call for Papers

ICSE is the premier forum for presenting and discussing the most recent and significant technical research contributions in the field of Software Engineering. In the technical track, we invite high quality submissions of technical research papers describing original and unpublished results of software engineering research.

Please note the following important changes for 2023:

- As previous ICSE editions, we apply an open science policy. This year, we will ask a reviewer to perform a lightweight check on the shared artifacts (see below).
- There will be a second response period for a subset of the submitted papers. Please check our calendar of important dates.

Also, we will continue the initiative started in 2022, giving emphasis to the significance of the research contributions (see review criteria).

## Research of Interest

ICSE welcomes submissions addressing topics across the full spectrum of Software Engineering, being inclusive of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research.

Topics of interest include:
- API design and evolution
- Apps and app store analysis
- Autonomic systems and self adaptation
- Configuration management
- Crowd-based software engineering
- Debugging and fault localization
- Design for quality, incl. privacy and security by design
- Distributed and collaborative software engineering
- Diversity, inclusion, fairness of software
- Embedded and cyber-physical systems
- Ethics in software engineering
- Evolution and maintenance
- Feedback, user, and requirements management
- Formal methods
- Green and sustainable technologies
- Human aspects of software engineering
- Human-computer interaction
- Legal aspects of software engineering
- Machine learning with and for SE
- Mining software repositories
- Model checking
- Modeling and model-driven engineering
- Parallel and distributed systems
- Performance analysis and testing
- Privacy and security
- Program analysis
- Program comprehension
- Program repair
- Program synthesis
- Programming languages
- Recommender systems
- Refactoring
- Release engineering and DevOps
- Reliability and safety
- Requirements engineering
- Reverse engineering
- SE for machine learning
- Search-based software engineering
- Software architecture and product design
- Software economics
- Software ecosystems
- Software metrics and prediction models
- Software processes
- Software reuse
- Software services and cloud-based systems
- Software testing
- Software traceability
- Software visualization
- Variability and product lines

## Review Criteria

Each paper submitted to the Technical Track will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

- Soundness: The extent to which the paper’s contributions and/or innovations address its research questions and are supported by rigorous application of appropriate research methods

- Significance: The extent to which the paper’s contributions can impact the field of software engineering, and under which assumptions (if any)
- Novelty: The extent to which the contributions are sufficiently original with respect to the state-of-the-art

- Verifiability and Transparency: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to understand how an innovation works; to understand how data was obtained, analyzed, and interpreted; and how the paper supports independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions. New this year: the artifacts attached to the paper (or hyperlinked to it) will be checked by at least one reviewer.

- Presentation: The extent to which the paper’s quality of writing meets the high standards of ICSE, including clear descriptions, as well as adequate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and adherence to the formatting instructions provided below.

Reviewers will carefully consider all of these criteria during the review process, and authors should take great care in clearly addressing them all. The paper should clearly explain the claimed contributions, and how they are sound, significant, novel, and verifiable, as described above.

Each paper will be handled by an area chair. The role of the area chairs is to ensure a reviewing consistency among papers submitted within the same area of research. For this reason, we will ask the authors, upon submission, to identify up to two main areas to which the paper belongs, among the following ones:

- Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering
- Analysis and Testing
- Dependability
- Requirements, modeling, and design
- Social Aspects
- Software Evolution
- Software Analytics

Program chairs will ultimately assign a paper to an area chair, considering the authors’ selection, the paper’s content, and (if applicable) keeping into account possible conflicts of interest.

For more information on how the ICSE PC will interpret and use these criteria in the paper evaluation process, please see the ICSE 2023 Review Process and Guidelines.

## How to Submit

Submissions must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options).

- All submissions must not exceed 10 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, appendices, etc. Two more pages containing only references are permitted. All submissions must be in PDF. Accepted papers will be allowed one extra page for the main text of the camera-ready version.

- Submissions must strictly conform to the IEEE conference proceedings formatting instructions specified above . Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in desk rejection without further review.

- By submitting to the ICSE Technical Track, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ . In particular, papers submitted to ICSE 2023 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for ICSE 2023 . Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate action will be taken in all such cases. To check for double submission and plagiarism issues, the chairs reserve the right to (1) share the list of submissions with the PC Chairs of other conferences with overlapping review periods and (2) use external plagiarism detection software, under contract to the ACM or IEEE, to detect violations of these policies.

- If the research involves human participants/subjects, the authors must adhere to the ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Upon submitting, authors will declare their compliance to such a policy.

- The ICSE 2023 Technical Track will employ a double-anonymous review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-anonymous review process. In particular:
-- Authors’ names must be omitted from the submission.
-- All references to the author’s prior work should be in the third person.
-- While authors have the right to upload preprints on ArXiV or similar sites, they should avoid specifying that the manuscript was submitted to ICSE 2023.
-- During review, authors should not publicly use the submission title.

- Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-anonymous review process can be found in the Q&A page.

- By submitting to the ICSE Technical Track, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM , and the authorship policy of the IEEE .

Submissions to the Technical Track that meet the above requirements can be made via the Technical Track submission site ( https://icse2023.hotcrp.com) by the submission deadline. Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk rejected without further review.

We encourage the authors to upload their paper info early (and can submit the PDF later) to properly enter conflicts for double-anonymous reviewing. Authors are encouraged to try out the experimental SIGSOFT Submission Checker to detect violations to the formatting and double anonymous guidelines. (Mind that the tool is based on heuristics. Therefore it may miss violations, and it can raise false alarms. The requirements listed in this call for papers take precedence over the results of the tool when deciding whether a paper meets the submission guidelines.)

## Open Science Policy

The research track of ICSE 2023 is governed by the ICSE 2023 Open Science policies. In summary, the steering principle is that all research results should be accessible to the public and, if possible, empirical studies should be reproducible. In particular, we actively support the adoption of open data and open source principles and encourage all contributing authors to disclose (anonymized and curated) data to increase reproducibility and replicability. Note that sharing research data is not mandatory for submission or acceptance. However, sharing is expected to be the default, and non-sharing needs to be justified. We recognize that reproducibility or replicability is not a goal in qualitative research and that, similar to industrial studies, qualitative studies often face challenges in sharing research data. For guidelines on how to report qualitative research to ensure the assessment of the reliability and credibility of research results, see the Q&A page .

Upon submission to the research track, authors are asked

- to make their data available to the program committee (via upload of supplemental material or a link to an anonymous repository) – and provide instructions on how to access this data in the paper; or

- to include in the paper an explanation as to why this is not possible or desirable; and

- to indicate if they intend to make their data publicly available upon acceptance.

NEW! This year, at least one reviewer will check whether the enclosed package contains what is declared in the paper. This quality check process will be very lightweight, and the main aim is to ensure that authors do not submit (partially) empty packages.

Supplementary material can be uploaded via the HotCrp site or anonymously linked from the paper submission. Although PC members are not required to look at this material, we strongly encourage authors to use supplementary material to provide access to anonymized data, whenever possible. Authors are asked to carefully review any supplementary material to ensure it conforms to the double-anonymous policy (described above). For example, code and data repositories may be exported to remove version control history, scrubbed of names in comments and metadata, and anonymously uploaded to a sharing site to support review. One resource that may be helpful in accomplishing this task is this blog post .

Upon acceptance, authors have the possibility to separately submit their supplementary material to the ICSE 2023 Artifact Evaluation track, for recognition of artifacts that are reusable, available, replicated or reproduced.

## Mentoring for Prospective Authors

We are organizing an “Ask me Anything” (AMA) Session on Best practices for a successful ICSE paper in June 2022 for prospective authors to learn from the 2022 ICSE PC co-chairs, Andreas Zeller and Daniela Damian.

Details about this event will be announced a couple of months before the event will happen.

## Author Response Periods

ICSE 2023 will offer response periods for authors. In such periods, the authors will have the opportunity to inspect the reviews, and to answer specific questions raised by the program committee.

ICSE 2023 will foresee two response periods. The first one is scheduled after all reviews have been completed, and serves to inform the subsequent decision making process. Authors will be able to see the full reviews, including the reviewer scores as part of the author response process. The second one follows a period of review discussion, and will involve only some papers, for which additional reviews were needed, or where, during the discussion, further questions for the authors emerged.

Note that:

- Participating in the response period is optional for the authors, i.e., omitting a rebuttal does not necessarily prejudice the paper’s outcome.

- Not being invited to participate in the second response period does not mean the paper has been rejected (nor accepted), but just that reviewers felt that a second response period was unnecessary.

## Withdrawing a Paper

Authors can withdraw their paper at any moment until the final decision has been made, through the paper submission system. Resubmitting the paper to another venue before the final decision has been made without withdrawing from ICSE 2023 first is considered a violation of the concurrent submission policy, and will lead to automatic rejection from ICSE 2023 as well as any other venue adhering to this policy.

## Important Dates

- Technical Track Submissions Deadline: September 1, 2022
- Technical Track Author First Response Period (all papers): November 14–16, 2022
- Technical Track Author Second Response Period (some papers): November 28–29, 2022
- Technical Track Acceptance Notification: December 9, 2022
- Technical Track Camera Ready: TBA

## Conference Attendance Expectation

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for ICSE 2023 and present the paper. [We will add more info on this as soon as the ICSE 2023 format is finalized.]