Research TrackICSE 2024
Call for papers
The International Conference on Software Engineering (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 In the research track, we invite high-quality submissions of technical research papers describing original and unpublished results of software engineering research.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 2024:

In 2024, ICSE will follow a dual deadline structure for submission of papers. In other words, submissions will occur in two cycles. This is the most important change. Please refer to the section on Dual Submission Cycles in the following for the information.

For each paper submitted to Research track in ICSE 2024, authors will need to choose one of seven focus areas. Please see the section on Research Areas in the following.

Research Areas
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 the following and are grouped into the following seven research areas.

Each submission will need to indicate one of these seven areas as the chosen area. Optionally, the authors can consider adding an additional area. A paper may be moved from the chosen area(s) to another focus area at the discretion of the program chairs. Program chairs will ultimately assign a paper to an area chair, considering the authors’ selection, the paper’s content, and other factors such as (if applicable) possible conflicts of interest.

AI and software engineering, Auto-coding
SE for Machine learning systems
Machine learning for SE tasks
Recommender systems
Autonomic systems and self-healing systems
Program synthesis
Program repair
AI for DevOps
Code generation from machine learning models
Analytics
Mining software repositories, communication platforms, and novel software engineering data sources
Apps and app store analysis
Software ecosystems
Configuration management
Software visualization
Data-driven user experience understanding and improvement
Data driven decision making in software engineering
Dependability and Security
Formal methods
Model Checking
Reliability and Safety
Vulnerability detection to enhance software security
System design to enhance software security
Privacy, Robustness, Fairness: Checking and Enforcement
Embedded and cyber-physical systems: modeling and validation
Evolution
Evolution and maintenance
API design and evolution
Release engineering and DevOps
Software reuse
Refactoring and program differencing
Program comprehension
Reverse engineering
Environments and software development tools
Traceability to understand evolution
Human and Social aspects
Human and organizational aspects of software engineering
Interaction in programming environments and software engineering tools
Distributed and collaborative software engineering
Agile methods and software processes
Software economics
Community-based software engineering (e.g., open source, crowdsourcing)
Ethics in software engineering
Green and sustainable technologies
Research on diversity, inclusion and social issues in software engineering
Requirements and modeling
Requirements Engineering (incl. non-functional requirements)
Design for quality, including privacy and security by design
Feedback, user and requirements management
Modelling and Model-Driven Engineering
Software Architecture and Design
Variability and product lines
Systems and software traceability
Software services and cloud-based systems
Testing and analysis
Software testing
Program analysis
Debugging and fault localization
Programming languages: developer-centric issues
Automated test generation techniques such as search and symbolic execution
Testing and analysis of non-functional properties
GUI testing
Mobile application testing
Scope
Since the authors will choose an area for their submission, the scope of each area becomes important. Some submissions may relate to multiple areas. In such cases, the authors should choose the area for which their paper brings the maximum new insights. Moreover, authors also have the choice of indicating an alternate area for each paper.

Similarly, for certain papers. authors may have a question whether it belongs to any area, or it is simply out of scope. For such cases, we recommend the authors to judge whether their paper brings new insights for software engineering. As an example, a formal methods paper with a focus on hardware verification may be deemed out of scope for ICSE. In general, papers which only peripherally concern software engineering and do not give new insights from the software engineering perspective would be less relevant to ICSE. Our goal is however to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive, to enable authors to make their own decisions about relevance.

Dual Submission Cycles – New for ICSE 2024
Since ICSE 2024 will have a different timeline from previous ICSEs, we request authors to kindly take note of the dates. The dates for the two submission cycles are as follows

First submission cycle

Submission: March 29, 2023
Notification: June 2, 2023
Revision due: July 10, 2023
Final Decisions: August 24, 2023
Camera-ready: Sept 15, 2023

Second submission cycle

Submission: August 1, 2023
Notification: October 10, 2023
Revision due: Nov 17, 2023
Final Decisions: Dec 15, 2023
Camera ready: Jan 12, 2024
Papers accepted for the first submission cycle of ICSE 24 will be available in the ACM and IEEE Digital Libraries after the camera-ready deadline of September 15 2023. Once papers have been reviewed, authors will be able to see the full reviews, including the reviewer scores. There is no rebuttal phase for either cycle.

Review Criteria
Each paper submitted to the Research Track will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

i) Novelty: The novelty and innovativeness of contributed solutions, problem formulations, methodologies, theories and/or evaluations, i.e., the extent to which the paper is sufficiently original with respect to state-of-the-art.

ii) Rigor: The soundness, clarity and depth of a technical or theoretical contribution, and the level of thoroughness and completeness of an evaluation.

iii) Relevance: The significance and/or potential impact of the research to the field of software engineering.

iv) 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. Any artifacts attached to or linked from the paper may be checked by one reviewer.

v) Presentation: The clarity of the exposition in the paper.

Reviewers will carefully consider all of the above criteria during the review process, and authors should take great care in clearly addressing them all. The paper should clearly explain and justify the claimed contributions. Each paper will be handled by an area chair who will ensure reviewing consistency among papers submitted within that area.

The outcome of each paper will be one of the following Accept, Conditional Accept, Revision, Reject. Note that papers which are Accepted straight-away may still involve changes by authors in the camera-ready version, but these changes will not be checked any further by PC. We now elaborate the Conditional Accept and the Revision outcomes in the following.

Conditional Accept
Authors of papers receiving a Conditional Accept decision are expected to submit the revised papers with changes marked in a different color, such as using LaTeXdiff. The authors also need to submit an “Author Response” document capturing the authors’ response to each reviewer comment and how those comments were addressed in the revision. This is similar to the “Summary of Changes and Response” document that is typically submitted by authors for a journal paper major revision. The reviewers will check the revised paper against the original paper and the suggested changes. Conditional Accepts will be checked by only one member of the Program Committee, and this will be done in one pass. We expect all papers receiving Conditional Accept to be accepted, even though this is not guaranteed.

Revisions
Papers submitted can go through revisions in response to specific revision requests made by the reviewers. Authors of papers receiving a Revision decision are expected to submit the revised papers with changes marked in a different color, such as using LaTeXdiff. The authors also need to submit an “Author Response” document capturing the authors’ response to each reviewer comment and how those comments were addressed in the revision. This is similar to the “Summary of Changes and Response” document that is typically submitted by authors for a journal paper major revision. Authors may use the revision opportunity to revise and improve the paper, but should not use this to submit a substantially different paper. The reviewers will check the revised paper against the original paper and the suggested changes. Revised papers will be examined by the same set of reviewers. An unsatisfactory revised paper will be rejected.

Re-submissions of rejected papers
Authors of papers which receive a REJECT decision in the first submission cycle are strongly discouraged from re-submitting it to the second submission cycle. However, in exceptional cases where the authors feel that the reviewers misunderstood their paper, authors can re-submit their paper to the second submission cycle with a “Clarifications and Summary of Improvements” document stating how they have changed the paper. They should also include the past reviews as part of this document, for completeness. These papers will be treated as new submissions which may or may not get the same set of reviewers at the discretion of the PC chairs. Authors who try to bypass this guideline (e.g., by changing the paper title without significantly changing paper content, or by making small changes to the paper content) will have their papers desk-rejected by the PC chairs without further consideration. Papers rejected from the first or second submission cycle of ICSE2024 can be submitted to ICSE2025 without any restrictions.

Submission Process
All authors should use the official “ACM Primary Article Template”, as can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page. LaTeX users should use the sigconf option, as well as the review (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers) and anonymous (omitting author names) options. To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document:

\documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart}

\acmConference[ICSE 2024]{46th International Conference on Software Engineering}{April 2024}{Lisbon, Portugal}

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 ACM 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 Research 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. Papers submitted to ICSE 2024 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for ICSE 2024. 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.
By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM's new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.
Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.
The ICSE 2024 Research 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 must avoid specifying that the manuscript was submitted to ICSE 2024.
During review, authors should not publicly use the submission title. They should thus use a different paper title for any pre-print in arxiv or similar websites.
Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-anonymous review process can be found in the Q&A page from prior ICSEs.
By submitting to the ICSE Research 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 Research Track submission site by the submission deadline. Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk rejected without further review.

Submission site (first cycle March 2023): https://icse2024early.hotcrp.com/

Submission site (second cycle August 2023): To be posted

We encourage the authors to upload their paper info early (and can submit the PDF later) to properly enter conflicts for double-anonymous reviewing. It is the sole responsibility of the authors to ensure that the formatting guidelines, double anonymous guidelines, and any other submission guidelines are met at the time of paper submission.

Open Science Policy
The research track of ICSE 2024 is governed by the ICSE 2024 Open Science policies. The guiding 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 artifact and open source principles. We encourage all contributing authors to disclose (anonymized and curated) data/artifacts to increase reproducibility and replicability. Note that sharing research artifacts 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 this previously curated Q&A page.

Upon submission to the research track, authors are asked

to make their artifact 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 why they do not intend to make their data or study materials publicly available upon acceptance, if that is the case. The default understanding is that the data and/or other artifacts will be publicly available upon acceptance of a paper.

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 2024 first is considered a violation of the concurrent submission policy, and will lead to automatic rejection from ICSE 2024 as well as any other venue adhering to this policy. Such violations may also be reported to appropriate organizations e.g. ACM and IEEE.

Conference Attendance Expectation
If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for ICSE 2024 and present the paper. We are assuming that the conference will be in-person, and if it is virtual or hybrid, virtual presentations may be possible. These matters will be discussed with authors closer to the date of the conference.