1st International Workshop on
Software Engineering and Research Software

(SERS 2026)

Tuesday, 14 April 2026

Software enables critical research in a variety of scientific and engineering disciplines. Yet those who write this “research software” are often disconnected from the software engineering research (SER) community, whose research does not focus on the unique challenges of research software.

This initial Software Engineering and Research Software (SERS) workshop aims to bring the particular needs of research software engineering to, and those who write that software into, the ICSE community. It builds on Dagstuhl Seminar 24161, “Research Software Engineering: Bridging Knowledge Gaps,” held in April 2024, which brought together software engineering researchers and research software engineers to facilitate better understanding and initiate collaborations.

By extending this focus, our workshop aims to help software engineering researchers gain knowledge about research software, its developers and maintainers, and the processes they use. It provides examples of successful projects involving both software engineering research and research software to further highlight opportunities in studying this area in more detail: new research challenges that need innovative solutions, new opportunities to apply and study software engineering practices. As such, the workshop is also intended to further develop the community of collaborating software engineering researchers and research software engineers that was catalyzed by the Dagstuhl seminar.

Call for Papers

Software enables critical research in a variety of scientific and engineering disciplines. Yet those who write this “research software” are often disconnected from the software engineering research (SER) community, whose research does not focus on the unique challenges of research software.

Over the last twelve or so years, “research software engineering” has been formalized as the field that applies software engineering to research software, with the aim to create better software, that in turn enables better research.

This workshop aims to bring the needs of research software engineering to, and those who write that software into, the ICSE community. It aims to help software engineering researchers gain knowledge about research software, its developers and maintainers, and the processes they use. It provides examples of successful projects involving both software engineering research and research software to further highlight opportunities in studying this area in more detail: new research challenges that need innovative solutions, new opportunities to apply and study software engineering practices.

As such, the workshop is also intended to develop the community of collaborating software engineering researchers and research software engineers.

Submissions

We welcome submissions to the workshop that present relevant software engineering research on research software or research software engineering, in particular, but not limited to:

(1) “success stories”, reporting successful work with research software engineers and research software projects,

(2) “challenges” that software engineering researchers or research software have encountered challenges in applying specific software engineering methods in research software projects, and

(3) innovative software engineering methods, processes and tools that can improve research software engineering practice (“SE for RSEng”).

Please note that the focus of the workshop is software engineering research on research software and research software engineering. Submissions outside of this scope - e.g., that only present a single piece of research software - may not be reviewed, and will not be accepted.

Submission Guidelines

We invite the submission of extended abstracts (up to 2 pages).

All submissions must be in English, in PDF format, and must not exceed 2 pages (including references and appendices).

The workshop follows a single-anonymous review process, i.e., anonymizing the submission is not required. All submissions will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee on the basis of relevance, technical quality, significance, and clarity. Decisions regarding the acceptance of submissions will be made by the program committee, based on reviews and consideration of how submissions contribute to the overall program.

All submissions must strictly conform to the official ACM conference proceedings formatting instructions. Templates can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page.

LaTeX users should use the sigconf option, as well as the review option to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers. To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document: \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}.

Other detailed submission policies and formatting guidelines are aligned with the ICSE 2026 Research Track submission process.

All accepted extended abstracts will be included in the proceedings and are free of APC charges as per the ACM policies for open-access publishing.

Submit via HotCRP: https://icse2026-sers.hotcrp.com