The coverage and content of ICSE papers, and the peer review process suffers from several issues. In this paper we highlight some issues and suggest a scoring scheme and some other methods that could result in improvements. First, we suggest that several of the main tracks at ICSE should be merged; the most important reason for this is that calling one track the ‘Research’ track, and the others by different names, implies the other tracks do not involve research results. Secondly, we suggest actively focusing on encouraging more coverage of under-represented topics such as requirements, design and user experience by having reviewers separately score interestingness and potential impact, as well as undertaking light affirmative action towards papers in such topics. Thirdly we suggest actively encouraging conciseness, so papers are faster to review and are more likely to be read, by slightly increasing the acceptance probability of papers that are considerably shorter than the page limit. Beyond this we also suggest relaxing the current double-blind standard to overcome certain difficulties, and giving discounts for to the conference for those who do reviews. The ideas presented in this paper were derived in part from the community survey, where many respondents expressed concerns about peer review, and also by the experiences of the author as general chair of ICSE 2025.

Prof Lethbridge is a professor of computer science and software engineering at the University of Ottawa, where he has taught since 1994. He is a senior member of the ACM and the IEEE and is a Professional Engineer. He is co-general chair of ICSE 2025 in Ottawa. His research interests include software engineering tools, user experience, software modelling, code generation, enterprise architecture and software engineering education. He leads the Umple project, a technology for modeling and generating systems.