BoatSE 2026

A strong research community is forming around the use of bots and agents in software engineering. Bots have become increasingly prevalent in software engineering, automating numerous software engineering tasks, from dependency updates to continuous integration. The latest development in Generative Artificial Intelligence has brought forth a new type of software engineering tool: LLM-powered Agents. Agents hold the promise to automate more complex tasks, e.g., code review and bug fixing, and are an emerging research area that needs further collaboration to tackle new and open challenges.

With this seventh edition of the successful ICSE BotSE workshop series, we aim to provide a venue for the software engineering bots and agents research community. This workshop’s title has evolved to become the ICSE BoatSE workshop. The workshop’s goal is to create an environment where the research community can meet and discuss current research and open challenges, as well as emerging bot/agent technologies and their interactions with software practitioners, while charting future directions. The workshop accepts work-in-progress papers, position papers, experience reports and extended abstracts. We will provide ample discussion time and a panel, focusing on the past and future of bots/agents in SE, to maximize participant engagement.

Workshop Website

For more information, please access the BoatSE workshop website

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

Bots (short for software robots) are software applications that perform repetitive or simple tasks. In particular, social and chatbots interacting with humans are a recent research topic. Similarly, bots can be used to automate many tasks that are performed by software practitioners and teams in their day-to-day work. Recent work argues that bots can save developers’ time and significantly increase productivity. Therefore, the goal of this one-day workshop is to bring together software engineering researchers and practitioners to discuss the opportunities and challenges of bots in software engineering. We solicit 6-page work-in-progress papers, position papers, and experience reports. Work-in-progress papers are expected to describe new research results and make contributions to the body of knowledge in the area. Position papers are expected to discuss controversial issues in the field or describe interesting or thought-provoking ideas that are not yet fully developed. Experience reports are expected to describe experiences with (amongst other things) the development, deployment, and maintenance of bot-based systems in the software engineering domain. We have also included 5-page extended abstract publications free of APC charges that will appear as extended abstracts in the proceedings. All submissions will be reviewed by at least three program committee members. Accepted submissions will be invited to give a talk to present their findings.

Submissions may address issues along the general themes, including but not limited to the following topics:

• Using bots and agents to derive software requirements and documentation
• Using bots and agents in the context of the reliability, quality, safety, security, privacy, and trustworthiness of software systems
• Using bots and agents to support software continuous integration, deployment, and delivery
• Using bots and agents to enhance and support software testing & maintenance
• Supporting and answering developer questions using bots
• Issues related to the use of, or research on, SE bots and agents (e.g., privacy, ethical, human-computer interaction)
• Practical experiences in developing bots
• Experiences on using bot frameworks in software systems

Important Dates

All deadlines are firm at Anywhere on Earth (AoE):

• Submission Deadline: 20 October 2025
• Acceptance Notification: 1 December 2025
• Camera Ready: 26 January 2026

How to Submit (adapted from ICSE)

Submissions should be made via HotCRP by the submission deadline.

All submissions must be in PDF format and conform, at the time of submission, to the official ACM Primary Article Template, which can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page. LaTeX users should use the sigconf option and the review option to produce line numbers for reviewer reference. The following LaTeX code should be placed at the start of the document:

\documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}

Submissions must not exceed 6 pages, including all text, figures, tables, and appendices; one additional page containing only references is permitted.

By submitting to BoatSE 2026, authors acknowledge awareness and agreement with the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. Papers must not have been published or be under review elsewhere during the BoatSE 2026 review process.

Authors should acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the IEEE, submission policy of the IEEE, and the authorship policy of the ACM (and associated FAQ). This includes following these points related to the use of Generative AI:

• “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 Acknowledgements 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 acknowledgements section of the Work.” - ACM
• “The use of artificial intelligence (AI)-generated text in an article shall be disclosed in the acknowledgements section of any paper submitted to an IEEE Conference or Periodical. The sections of the paper that use AI-generated text shall have a citation to the AI system used to generate the text.” - IEEE
• “If you are using generative AI software tools to edit and improve the quality of your existing text in much the same way you would use a typing assistant like Grammarly to improve spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement or to use a basic word processing system to correct spelling or grammar, it is not necessary to disclose such usage of these tools in your Work.” - ACM