Call for Papers
We invite high-quality submissions from both industry and academia, describing original and unpublished results of theoretical, empirical, conceptual, and experimental software engineering research.

Contributions should describe innovative and significant original research. Papers describing groundbreaking approaches to emerging problems are also welcome, as well as replication papers. Submissions that facilitate reproducibility by using available datasets or making the described tools and datasets publicly available are especially encouraged. For a list of specific topics of interest, please see the end of this call.

Tracks
This CFP refers to the Research Track of FSE 2027. For the remaining tracks, please check the specific calls on the website: https://conf.researchr.org/home/fse-2027

How to Submit
The following only applies to the main track of FSE. For the other tracks please see the general formatting instructions.

At the time of submission, each paper should have no more than 18 pages for all text and figures, plus 4 pages for references. Major revisions should have no more than 20 pages for all text and figures, plus 4 pages for references. Papers should use the following templates: Latex or Word (Mac) or Word (Windows). Please consult the ACM proceedings website for more information about the latest versions of the various templates (https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template). Authors using LaTeX should use the sample-acmsmall-conf.tex file (found in the samples folder of the acmart package) with the acmsmall option. We also strongly encourage the use of the review, screen, and anonymous options as well. In summary, you want to use:

\documentclass[acmsmall,screen,review,anonymous]{acmart}
Papers may use either numeric or author-year format for citations. It is a single-column page layout. Submissions that do not comply with the above instructions will be desk rejected without review. Papers must be submitted electronically through the FSE 2027 submission site. The link will be posted when we’re closer to the deadline.

Each submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. The initial decision can be accept, reject or major revision. When the initial decision is major revision, authors will have an opportunity to address all of the reviewers’s requests including but not restricted to any meta-review available during the major revision period. Such requests may include additional experiments or new analyses of existing results; major rewriting of algorithms and explanations; clarifications, better scoping, and improved motivations. The revised submission must be accompanied by a response letter, where the authors explain how they addressed each concern expressed by the reviewers. The same reviewers who requested major revisions will then assess whether the revised submission satisfies their requests adequately. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of originality, importance of contribution, soundness, evaluation (if relevant), quality of presentation, and appropriate comparison to related work. Some papers may have more than three reviews, as PC chairs may solicit additional reviews based on factors such as reviewer expertise and strong disagreement between reviewers. The program committee as a whole will make final decisions about which submissions to accept for publication.

Double-Anonymous Review Process
In order to ensure the fairness of the reviewing process, the FSE 2027 Research Papers Track will employ a double-anonymous review process, where reviewers do not know the identity of authors, and authors do not know the identity of reviewers. The papers submitted must not reveal the authors’ identities in any way:

Authors should leave out author names and affiliations from the body of their submission.
Authors should ensure that any citation to related work by themselves is written in third person, that is, “the prior work of XYZ” as opposed to “our prior work”.
Authors should not include URLs to author-revealing sites (tools, datasets). Authors are still encouraged to follow open science principles and submit replication packages, see more details on the open science policy below.
Authors should anonymize organization names that might reveal author affiliations, and instead provide the general characteristics of the organizations involved needed to understand the context of the paper.
Authors are encouraged to avoid including an acknowledgements section in a paper at submission time.
While authors have the right to upload preprints on ArXiV or similar sites, they should avoid specifying that the manuscript was submitted to FSE 2027.
Authors should provide a supporting statement on the availability of a replication package (or lack thereof) in their submitted papers in a section named Data Availability after the Conclusion section.
The double-anonymous process used is “heavy”, i.e., the paper anonymity will be maintained during all reviewing and discussion periods. In case of major revision, authors must therefore maintain anonymity in their response letter and must provide no additional information that could be author-revealing.

Authors with further questions on double-anonymous reviewing are encouraged to contact the program chairs by email. Papers that do not comply with the double-anonymous review process will be desk-rejected.

Submission Policies
The authors must follow the “ACM Policy on Authorship” released September 16, 2025 and its accompanying FAQ, including the following points:

“Generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT, may not be listed as authors of an ACM published Work. The use of generative AI tools and technologies to create content is permitted but must be fully disclosed in the Work. For example, the authors could include the following statement in the Acknowledgments section of the Work: ChatGPT was utilized to generate sections of this Work, including text, tables, graphs, code, data, citations, etc. If you are uncertain ­about the need to disclose the use of a particular tool, err on the side of caution, and include a disclosure in the acknowledgments section of the Work.”

“Basic word processing systems that recommend and insert replacement text, perform spelling or grammar checks and corrections, or systems that do language translations are to be considered exceptions to this disclosure requirement and are generally permitted and need not be disclosed in the Work. As the line between Generative AI tools and basic word processing systems like MS-Word or Grammarly becomes blurred, this Policy will be updated.”

Please read the full policy and FAQ.

Papers submitted for consideration to FSE should not have been already published elsewhere and should not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere during the reviewing period. Specifically, authors are required to adhere to the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the ACM Policy on Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submissions.

To prevent double submissions, the chairs might compare the submissions with related conferences that have overlapping review periods. The double submission restriction applies only to refereed journals and conferences, not to unrefereed forums (e.g. arXiv.org). To check for plagiarism issues, the chairs might use external plagiarism detection software.

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 to any of the above policies will be reported to ACM for further investigation and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per the ACM Publications Policies.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process if your paper is accepted. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and they have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all published authors. ACM is 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 authors of accepted papers are invited and strongly encouraged to attend the conference to present their work. Attendance at the event is not mandatory for publication. Authors also have the option of not presenting their work at the conference, in which case they do not need to register.

Important Dates
Please see the panel on the right for the submission deadline, etc.

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. Please also note that the names and list of authors as well as the title in the camera-ready version cannot be modified from the ones in the submitted version unless there is explicit approval from the track chairs.

Open Science Policy
The research track of FSE has introduced an open science policy. Openness in science is key to fostering scientific progress via transparency, reproducibility, and replicability. The steering principle is that all research results should be accessible to the public, if possible, and that 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. Upon submission to the research track, authors are asked to make a replication package available to the program committee (via upload of supplemental material or a link to a private or public repository) or to comment on why this is not possible or desirable. Furthermore, authors are asked to indicate whether they intend to make their data publicly available upon acceptance. We ask authors to provide a supporting statement on the availability of a replication package (or lack thereof) in their submitted papers in a section named Data Availability after the Conclusion section. This statement will not count towards the page limit for the submission. Be careful that such statements continue to maintain author anonymity.

Authors of accepted papers will be given an opportunity (and encouragement) to submit their data and tools to the separate FSE 2027 artifact evaluation committee.

Topics of Interest
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Artificial intelligence and machine learning for software engineering
Autonomic computing
Debugging and fault localization
Dependability, safety, and reliability
Distributed and collaborative software engineering
Embedded software, safety-critical systems, and cyber-physical systems
Empirical software engineering
Human and social aspects of software engineering
Human-computer interaction
Mining software repositories
Mobile development
Model checking
Model-driven engineering
Parallel, distributed, and concurrent systems
Performance engineering
Program analysis
Program comprehension
Program repair
Program synthesis
Programming languages
Recommendation systems
Requirements engineering
Search-based software engineering
Services, components, and cloud
Software architectures
Software engineering education
Software engineering for machine learning and artificial intelligence
Software evolution
Software processes
Software security
Software testing
Software traceability
Symbolic execution
Tools and environments
Policy on the Use of Generative AI Tools
FSE 2027 follows the ACM Policy on Authorship and the Use of Generative AI Tools and Technologies.

“When using Artificial Intelligence to conduct research, including the design and methodology of the research project, creation and selection of data sources, designing experiments, generation and collection of data, coding, implementing models, running simulations, data analysis, testing, validating results, deploying software, archiving data and code for reproducibility, or any other aspects of the research lifecycle that are directly relevant to the conclusions of the research underlying the Work, the specific use(s) of AI tools must be described in detail in the methods section of the Work. This includes the creation of artifacts that are directly relevant to the conclusions of the research, such as code, datasets, and charts or figures that rely on the AI tools.”

“When using Artificial Intelligence to assist with writing an ACM submission, ACM no longer requires the disclosure of information regarding the use of AI.”

“All named authors on an ACM submission will be held responsible and accountable for any problematic content contained in the submission regardless of the source of that problematic content:”

“In the event content integrity issues stemming from the use of AI during authorship are identified prior to publication or posting in the ACM Digital Library, ACM reserves the right to reject submissions in their entirety and impose additional penalties.”
“In the event content integrity issues stemming from the use of AI during authorship are identified after publication or posting in the ACM Digital Library, ACM reserves the right to retract the published Work in its entirety.”
The followings is strictly prohibited:

fabricated or hallucinated results, citations, or datasets,
plagiarism or unattributed AI-generated content,
unauthorized use of confidential or non-public material,
prompt injection or hidden instructions intended to manipulate reviewers or AI systems. Prompt injection includes hidden or adversarial text designed to influence automated systems or obtain favorable reviews. Violations may result in desk rejection and further action at the discretion of the Program Chairs.
Submissions will be checked for fabricated, hallucinated, or unverifiable references. Papers containing confirmed fabricated or hallucinated citations will be desk-rejected without review. Authors are responsible for ensuring that all references are accurate, authentic, and verifiable.