2030 Software Engineering - 2025

The landscape of software engineering has dramatically changed. The SE Atelier – Software Engineering in 2030 Workshop provides a forum to discuss the recent changes in software engineering, share a vision of the future evolution of software engineering, and refine the initial roadmap that emerged from the discussion at SE 2030 Software Engineering Roadmap Workshop (SEN Software Engineering Notes, The Trailer of the ACM 2030 Roadmap for Software Engineering https://doi.org/10.1145/3696117.3696126).

The breakthrough in machine learning and autonomous systems triggers the deepest change in the skyline of software engineering research and practice since the Internet revolution in the second half of the last century. The software engineering community has never seen a so fast and predominant growth of new research threads such as the study of machine learning in software engineering and the challenges of engineering machine-learning-driven systems, both of which have become the dominant themes of the main software engineering conferences and journals.

Machine learning, AI and autonomous systems shape a new landscape for software engineering by and for humans, and radically change even the basic concept of software artifact. The new software systems challenge software engineers with new ethical, fairness and technical problems. Humans become integral part of large software ecosystems, and the research in software engineering shall move beyond the short sight vision of users of software systems that bound the possible human interaction, toward a new vision of humans as integral part of cyberphysical ecosystems.

The concept of sustainable development extends beyond classic environmental concerns, and spreads over software systems in cyber-physical spaces. Sustainable software operations in cyber-physical spaces requires new design, development, deployment, and maintenance approaches that minimize the ecological footprint, enhance resource efficiency, and promote social responsibility.

Machine learning, and specifically Deep Neural Networks, DNN, and Large Language Models, LLM, are the largest magnification factor of the human productivity ever seen in software engineering since the pioneer times. They open new frontiers towards automated programming, upset the quality and security scenario, and raise new societal and legal issues.

Recent advances on knowledge compilation and meta solvers amplify the scalability of satisfiability analysis, and largely increase the application of tools to many software engineering problems, test-case generation, reachability analysis, analysis of product lines and configurable software.

The revolution in software production, the many emerging domains and the enormous growth of software systems in both size and complexity open new security issues far beyond classic security engineering. Engineering secure software systems is a key element of cybersecurity and opens many new challenges.

Submissions

We solicit papers with no more than eight pages not including bibliography. The papers shall identify a relevant research challenge in the contemporary landscape of software engineering, analyze the recent changes of the research in the identified area, and discuss the future challenges to research in the area.

Topics of Interest

We welcome papers that discuss challenges to software engineering research. A preliminary list of topics that we expect to complete with the contribution of the submitted papers include

• AI for software engineering
• Software engineering for AI
• Software engineering by and for humans
• Sustainable software engineering
• Satisfiability in software engineering
• Software quality with automated programming
• Software security analysis
• Software supply chain
• Engineering software for edge computing
• Quantum software engineering

Review process

All papers will be reviewed with the ACM TOSEM single blind review process: The organizers (the past and current ACM TOSEM Editors in Chief) will assign each paper to a committee member (an ACM TOSEM editor), who will select three reviewers, and will make a recommendation for both a workshop presentation and an invitation to submit an extended version to the ACM TOSEM 2030 Roadmap for Software Engineering special issue. The program committee will decide for acceptance in a virtual committee meeting.

ACM TOSEM 2030 Roadmap for Software Engineering 2026 special issue

The authors of the accepted papers will be invited to present the paper at the workshop. The authors of some selected regular papers will be invited to contribute to the ACM TOSEM 2030 2025-Roadmap for Software Engineering (early 2026) by extending the workshop papers with the suggestions of the reviewers and new ideas that may emerge during the discussions in the workshop.

As a published ACM author, 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.

Call for Papers

The landscape of software engineering has dramatically changed. In the workshop we discuss the recent changes in software engineering, share a vision of the future evolution of software engineering, and define a roadmap for the research community.

The recent breakthrough in machine learning and autonomous systems triggers the deepest change in the skyline of software engineering research and practice since the Internet revolution in the second half of the last century. The software engineering community has never seen a so fast and predominant growth of new research threads such as the study of machine learning in software engineering and the challenges of engineering machine-learning-driven systems, both of which have become the dominant themes of the main software engineering conferences and journals.

Machine learning, AI and autonomous systems shape a new landscape for software engineering by and for humans, and radically change even the basic concept of software artifact. The new software systems challenge software engineers with new ethical, fairness and technical problems. Humans become integral part of large software ecosystems, and the research in software engineering shall move beyond the short sight vision of users of software systems that bound the possible human interaction, toward a new vision of humans as integral part of cyberphysical ecosystems.

The concept of sustainable development extends beyond classic environmental concerns, and spreads over software systems in cyber-physical spaces. Sustainable software operations in cyber-physical spaces requires new design, development, deployment, and maintenance approaches that minimize the ecological footprint, enhance resource efficiency, and promote social responsibility.

Machine learning, and specifically Deep Neural Networks, DNN, and Large Language Models, LLM*, are the largest magnification factor of the human productivity ever seen in software engineering since the pioneer times. They open new frontiers towards automated programming, upset the quality and security scenario, and raise new societal and legal issues.

Recent advances on knowledge compilation and meta solvers amplify the scalability of satisfiability analysis, and largely increase the application of tools to many software engineering problems, test-case generation, reachability analysis, analysis of product lines and configurable software.

The revolution in software production, the many emerging domains and the enormous growth of software systems in both size and complexity open new security issues far beyond classic security engineering. Engineering secure software systems is a key element of cybersecurity and opens many new challenges.

Submissions

We solicit papers with no more than eight pages not including bibliography. The papers shall identify a relevant research challenge in the contemporary landscape of software engineering, analyse the recent changes of the research in the identified area, and discuss the future challenges to research in the area. We particularly welcome papers that discuss and extend the initial ideas that emerged in the SE2030 Software Engineering Roadmap workshop (https://conf.researchr.org/home/2030-se) and are summarized both in the SEN Software Engineering Notes Report (https://doi.org/10.1145/3696117.3696126) and in the ACM TOSEM Transactions on Software Engineering special Issue that will appear early in 2025. We want to emphasise that we are looking for forward looking articles and not survey articles. For forward looking articles, we do not need the future challenges to be solved, but they should be well articulated. One way of providing such concrete forward looking articles, could be to study the current state-of-the-practice (say a benchmark or a widely used tool) in a certain domain of software engineering, comment on its short-comings, and suggest a rich research direction from there.

How to Submit

The papers must be submitted via the Manuscript Central website http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tosem in the ACM authoring template by choosing the type SE2030 Software Engineering Roadmap.

Manuscripts accepted for publication in any ACM publication must be formatted using the ACM authoring template. Submissions must also use the ACM authoring templates. ACM style files will closely approximate the final output, enabling authors to judge the page-length of their published articles.

ACM authoring templates and detailed instructions on formatting can be found at http://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions. For both Word and Latex technical support, contact acmtexsupport@aptaracorp.com.

LaTeX Collaborative Authoring Tool on Overleaf Platform ACM has partnered with https://www.overleaf.com/, a free cloud-based, authoring tool, to provide an ACM LaTeX authoring template. Authors can easily invite colleagues to collaborate on their document. Among other features, the platform automatically compiles the document while an author writes, so the author can see what the finished file will look like in real time. Further information can be found at https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions. The ACM LaTeX template on Overleaf platform is available to all ACM authors https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/acm-official#.WOuOk2e1taQ.

Topics of Interest

We welcome papers that discuss challenges to software engineering research. A preliminary list of topics that we expect to complete with the contribution of the submitted papers include

• AI for software engineering
• Software engineering for AI
• Software engineering by and for humans
• Sustainable software engineering
• Satisfiability in software engineering
• Software quality with automated programming
• Software security analysis
• Software supply chain
• Engineering software for edge computing
• Quantum software engineering

Review process

All papers will be reviewed with the ACM TOSEM single blind review process: The organisers (the outgoing and incoming ACM TOSEM Editors in Chief) will assign each paper to a committee member (an ACM TOSEM editor), who will select three reviewers, and will make a recommendation for both a workshop presentation and an invitation to submit an extended version to the ACM TOSEM special issue. The program committee will decide for acceptance via online discussions.

ACM TOSEM 2030 Roadmap for Software Engineering special issue

The authors of the accepted papers will be invited to present the paper at the workshop. The authors of some selected regular papers will be invited to contribute to the ACM TOSEM 2030 2025-Roadmap for Software Engineering (early 2026) by extending the workshop papers with the suggestions of the reviewers and new ideas that may emerge during the discussions in the workshop. As a published ACM author, 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.