In 2025, the IEEE Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T) will replace ICSE’s traditional education track (SEET). CSEE&T 2025 will be co-located with ICSE 2025, allowing for a greater focus on software engineering education through a dedicated co-located conference. By joining forces, the goal is to bring together the two communities best placed to address the many challenges of educating the next generation of software engineers.

Call for Papers

The IEEE Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T) has established itself as a major venue for development and exchange of ideas in modern software engineering education. Over the years, the conference has become the center of a vibrant and innovative community of educators - both academics and industry professionals.

In 2025, the 37th edition of CSEE&T will be co-located with ICSE 2025 - the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering - in Ottawa, Canada. CSEE&T 2025 will replace ICSE’s traditional education track (SEET), allowing for a greater focus on software engineering education through a dedicated co-located conference. By joining forces with ICSE, we aim to bring together the two communities best placed to address the many challenges of educating the next generation of software engineers.

CSEE&T 2025 aims to solicit, review, and publish original high-quality contributions addressing challenges, innovations, and best practices in software engineering education and training. All types of software engineering education are of interest, including (but not limited to) primary and secondary education, university education at undergraduate and graduate levels, coding clubs, hackathons, bootcamps, industrial training, informal study, and life-long learning.

Topics of Interest

CSEE&T 2025 seeks original contributions covering all dimensions of learning and teaching in the area of software engineering. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Methods of teaching software engineering skills
• Methods of evaluating, assessing, and measuring software engineering skills
• Evaluation and assessment in software engineering education
• Automated evaluation of software engineering skills
• Evaluations of teaching and assessment methods in software engineering
• Empirical studies describing software engineering education contexts
• Pedagogical approaches supporting software engineering education and training in distributed and remote settings
• Learning technologies and tools that support software engineering education and training
• Developing soft skills (communication, collaboration, teamwork, organization, negotiation, conflict management) for software engineers
• Studies of equity, diversity, and inclusion in software engineering education and training
• Ethical and societal concerns (e.g., sustainability, human values) in software engineering education and training
• Onboarding and on-the-job training of software engineers
• Continuing education of software engineers
• Extra-curricular training of software engineering students (e.g., through hackathons, bootcamps)
• Certification and training for professional software engineers
• Use of online platforms and resources for software engineering education
• Role of culture and gender in software engineering education and training
• Introducing software engineering topics to children in primary and secondary education
• Encouraging synergy between academia and industry in software engineering education and training
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) in software engineering education

Submission Categories

Research Paper (max 10 pages, plus up to 2 pages for references)

A research paper must address a topic related to software engineering education using appropriate research techniques and proper scholarly writing. Negative and mixed findings are welcome.

Experience Report (max 10 pages, plus up to 2 pages for references)

An experience report provides anecdotal evidence by describing an experience related to software engineering education and training (typically a course, a teaching or training technique or strategy, or an assessment method) and interprets the experience in terms of actionable advice and lessons learned, but does not need to evaluate it or use rigorous research methods to support its claims. Negative and mixed findings are welcome, provided they can support advice or lessons learned.

Industry Paper (max 10 pages, plus up to 2 pages for references)

An industry paper is a research paper or an experience report (as described above) that covers the topic of software engineering education and training in industry. In this category, students are industry practitioners who learn about software engineering in an industry setting.

Idea Paper (max 5 pages, plus 1 page of references)

An idea paper must present a new software engineering education and training idea with a proposed formal evaluation strategy, possibly with some preliminary or informal results.

Tool Paper (max 5 pages, plus 1 page of references)

A tool paper describes a tool or technology built or customized by the authors that supports software engineering education and training. Papers in this category should discuss the impact of the tool on the learning process. A tool paper can optionally be accompanied by a short video (not exceeding five minutes) demonstrating the tool’s main functionality (if you use this option, please provide the link at the end of the abstract). Tools must be available online so they can be evaluated (also possible on a trial basis) and be mature enough.

Replication Paper (max 5 pages, plus 1 page of references)

A replication paper describes the repetition of an existing and already published pedagogical intervention (e.g. course, approach, study) in new contexts. The goal is to determine whether the basic findings related to the original pedagogical intervention can be applied to other circumstances.

Journal-first Submission (max 1 page)

A journal-first submission relates to a software engineering education and training paper already peer-reviewed and published in a journal. The authors will be invited to present their work at CSEE&T. They must submit a one-page presentation proposal consisting of the paper’s title, its authors, an extended abstract, and a pointer to the original journal paper on the journal’s web site.

Submissions should not exceed their respective category page limit, including all text, figures, tables, and appendices. The page limits are strict and non-compliance will result in a desk-rejection.

Evaluation Criteria

Submissions will be evaluated based on their category:

• Research Papers will be evaluated against these criteria: Relevance, Significance, Soundness, Verifiability, Presentation

• Experience Reports will be evaluated against these criteria: Relevance, Significance, Actionability, Lessons, Presentation

• Industry Papers will be evaluated like Research Papers when presenting research results and like Experience Reports when reporting on experiences

• Idea Papers will be evaluated against these criteria: Relevance, Significance, Soundness, Presentation

• Tool Papers will be evaluated against these criteria: Relevance, Significance, Presentation

• Replication Papers will be evaluated against these criteria: Relevance, Significance, Soundness, Presentation

• Journal-first Submissions will be evaluated based on their own category, as described above.

The evaluation criteria are defined as follows:

• Relevance: The extent to which the paper is relevant to CSEE&T.
• Significance: The extent to which the paper is well-motivated and its contributions are original and important, with respect to the existing literature on software engineering education and training.
• Soundness: The extent to which the paper’s contributions are supported by rigorous application of appropriate research methods and whether the paper discusses meaningfully the research methods’ limitations and threats to the validity of the findings.
• Verifiability: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to support independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions. This includes public availability of research data. In cases where this is not possible, an explicit statement covering why such data cannot be made publicly available is mandatory.
• Actionability: The extent to which the paper provides actionable advice with clear take-away messages.
• Lessons: The extent to which the paper meaningfully discusses lessons learned in terms of what went right, what went wrong, and what could be improved if the experience is repeated.
• Presentation: The extent to which the paper’s organization and quality of writing meets the standard: the paper is well-structured, employs clear and correct scholarly language, avoids ambiguity, includes clearly readable figures and tables, and is formatted according to the template specifications.

How to Submit

All submissions must conform to the ICSE 2025 formatting and submission instructions for both LaTeX and Word users. LaTeX users must use the provided acmart.cls and ACM-Reference-Format.bst without modification, enable the conference format in the preamble of the document (i.e., \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}), and use the ACM reference format for the bibliography (i.e., \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}). The review option adds line numbers, thereby allowing referees to refer to specific lines in their comments.

• By submitting to CSEE&T 2025, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism. In particular, papers submitted to CSEE&T 2025 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for CSEE&T 2025. 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 made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. 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.
• CSEE&T 2025 will employ a double-anonymous review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities in the paper nor in the artifacts, code, videos, tools, documentation, or repositories associated with the submission. 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 CSEE&T 2025.
  • During review, authors should not publicly use the submission title.
• Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-anonymous review process can be found on the ICSE 2025 Q&A.
• By submitting to CSEE&T 2025, authors acknowledge that they conform to the ACM Publications Policies and Procedures and the Ethical Requirements of the IEEE.

Submissions to CSEE&T 2025 that meet the above requirements can be made via the submission site 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 information early (and potentially submit the PDF later) and 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

CSEE&T 2025 aims to follow the ICSE 2025 Open Science policies. In summary, the steering principle is that research results should be made accessible to the public and empirical studies should be reproducible whenever possible. 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 whenever allowable and applicable.

We are aware that some datasets and tools may not be made open and public (e.g., when prohibited by a Non-Disclosure Agreement, when the Ethics Review Board forbids sharing data for participant privacy, when tool source code is commercial-in-confidence, etc.). We also 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 ICSE 2025 Open Science page. Note that sharing research data is not mandatory for submission or acceptance. However, non-sharing needs to be justified.

IMPORTANT: We therefore ask all authors to provide a supporting statement on the data availability (or lack thereof) in their submitted papers in a section named Data Availability after the Conclusion section. Authors can also provide anonymized links to anonymized data and repositories in that section or can upload anonymized data using the supplementary material upload option during submission process via the HotCRP submission site. Authors who cannot disclose data should provide a short statement explaining the reasons why they cannot share the data in the Data Availability section of their paper, after the Conclusion section.

Authors are asked to carefully review any supplementary material to ensure it conforms to the double-anonymous policy employed for ICSE 2025. 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. Below are some resources that can be helpful:

• Step-by-step approach to disclosing artifacts for (doubly-anonymous) peer review and make it open data upon acceptance
• Step-by-step approach to automatically archive a GitHub repository to Zenodo.org
• Step-by-step approach to automatically archive a GitHub repository to figshare.com
• Proposal for artifact evaluation by SIGSOFT
• Proposal for open science in software engineering, including explanations for structuring an open artifact

Important Dates

• Abstract paper deadline: Thursday, 3 October, 2024
• Paper submission deadline: Thursday, 10 October, 2024 - Submissions close at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12)
• Acceptance Notification: Monday, 16 December 2024
• Camera Ready: 22 January 2025

Conference Attendance Expectation

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for and attend the CSEE&T conference and present the paper. The presentation is expected to be delivered in person, or online if this is impossible due to travel limitations (related to, e.g., health, visa, or COVID-19 prevention).

Contacts

For more information, please contact the CSEE&T 2025 Program Co-Chairs:

• Robert Chatley, Imperial College London, rbc@imperial.ac.uk
• Cécile Péraire, Carnegie Mellon University, cecile.peraire@sv.cmu.edu