The IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER) is the premier event on the theory and practice of recovering information from existing software and systems. The event explores innovative methods to extract the many kinds of information that can be recovered from software, software engineering documents, and systems artifacts, and examines innovative ways of using this information in system renewal and program understanding.

SANER promotes discussion and interaction among researchers and practitioners about the development of maintainable systems, and the improvement, evolution, migration, and reengineering of existing systems. The venue also explores innovative methods of extraction for the many kinds of information of interest to software developers and examines innovative ways of using this information in system renewal and program understanding.

SANER will feature technical research paper sessions, workshops, an early research achievements track, an industry paper track, a tool demonstration track, and a dedicated track on negative results in software analysis, evolution and reengineering.

Why you should come to Montreal

Montreal is Canada’s cultural capital, a bilingual metropolis where the charm of Europe melds with the innovation of North America. It is the country’s second-largest urban centre, with a population of 4.1 million. Forbes named it the world’s tenth-cleanest city in 2007. Montreal is a melting pot of over 200 cultures, as reflected in its diverse culinary landscape. It is an academic hub and home to six major universities and their affiliated schools. Montreal’s reputation for blending a safe and vibrant environment with rich cultural experiences earned it the title of the best student city in the world by QS in 2017, attracting approximately 50,000 international students each year and positioning itself at the forefront of innovation and education.

Winter in Montreal transforms the city into a snowy playground, offering a multitude of vibrant activities. The season is perfect for gliding across the picturesque Bonsecours Basin ice skating rink or taking a festive stroll through the Montreal en Lumière festival, where light installations, live performances, and culinary delights dazzle the senses. For the adventurous, the nearby Mont Royal has become a haven for snowshoeing and cross-country skiing, offering panoramic views of the city blanketed in white. Not to be missed is the city’s renowned underground city, a warm respite from the chill, lined with shops and art displays. In March of every year, the city comes alive during Nuit Blanche, an all-night celebration of culture and arts, where galleries, theatres, and public spaces host an array of activities, performances, and interactive experiences that captivate residents and visitors alike.

For those attending the SANER 2025 conference, Montreal offers more than academic fulfillment; it provides a tapestry of experiences that intertwine with the city’s lifestyle. With a plethora of festivals, a vibrant underground city, world-class museums, bustling markets, exquisite culinary delights, colourful street art, diverse architecture, a rich tapestry of languages, and a thriving craft beer culture, it’s a place that fully engages all your senses.

Research Papers: Call for Papers

View track page for all details

Research Papers

The Research Track of the 32nd edition of the IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER 2025) invites high-quality submissions of papers describing original and unpublished research results. We encourage submissions describing various types of research, e.g., empirical, theoretical, and tool-oriented. The topics of the submissions should be of direct interest to the software analysis, evolution, and reengineering community. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

-AI for Software Engineering;

-Software Engineering for AI;

-Generative AI and LLM;

-Software Tools for Software Evolution and Maintenance;

-Software Analysis, Parsing, and Fact Extraction;

-Software Reverse Engineering and Reengineering;

-Program Comprehension;

-Software Evolution Analysis;

-Software Architecture Recovery and Reverse Architecting;

-Program Transformation and Refactoring;

-Mining Software Repositories and Software Analytics;

-Software Visualization;

-Software Reconstruction and Migration;

-Software Maintenance and Evolution;

-Program Repair;

-Software Release Engineering, Continuous Integration and Delivery;

-Empirical studies on all the above topics;

-Education related to all of the above topics;

-Legal aspects.

Special Issue

Authors of selected research papers accepted at SANER 2025 will be invited to submit revised, extended versions of their manuscripts for a special issue featured by Springer’s Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE). The best papers from the conference will be awarded. More details on this matter will be shared soon.

Evaluation Criteria

Research papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee. Submissions will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

-Soundness: The extent to which the paper’s contributions are supported by rigorous application of appropriate research methods;

-Significance: The extent to which the paper’s contributions are important with respect to open software engineering challenges;

-Novelty: The extent to which the contribution is sufficiently original and is clearly explained with respect to the state-of-the-art;

-Verifiability: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to support independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions;

-Presentation: The extent to which the paper’s quality of writing meets the standards of SANER, including clear descriptions and explanations, appropriate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and adherence to the formatting instructions provided below.

Submission Instructions

Submitted papers must have been neither previously accepted for publication nor concurrently submitted for review in another journal, book, conference, or workshop. All submissions must come in PDF format and conform, at the time of submission, to the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt font, LaTEX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf option. IEEE paper templates can be accessed from their official location. Also, papers must comply with the IEEE Policy on Authorship. All submissions must be in English. All papers must be submitted in PDF format through the web-based submission system https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=saner2025. Submissions should not exceed 12 pages (the last 2 pages for references only) and should be uploaded electronically in PDF format via EasyChair. Submissions that do not adhere to these limits or that violate the formatting guidelines will be desk-rejected without review.

Important note: SANER 2025 follows a full double-anonymous review process. To be compliant with the double-anonymous policy, submitted papers must adhere to the following rules (largely reused from ASE 2017 double-anonymous instructions):

-Author names and affiliations must be omitted;

-References to authors’ own related work must be in the third person. (For example, not We build on our previous work… but rather We build on the work of…);

-There may be cases in which the current submission is a clear follow-up of one of your previous works, and despite what was recommended in the previous point, reviewers will associate authorship of such a previous work with the current submission. In this case, you may decide to anonymize the reference itself at submission time. For example: based on previous results [10] .. where the reference is reported as [10] Anonymous Authors. Omitted per double-blind reviewing. In doing so, however, please make sure that the SANER 2025 submission is self-contained and that its content can be reviewed and understood without accessing the previous paper;

-Do not include acknowledgments of people, grants, organizations, etc. that would give away your identity. You may, of course, add these acknowledgments in the camera-ready version;

-If you use an identifiable naming convention for your work, such as a project name, use a different name for your submission, which you may indicate has been changed for double-blind reviewing. This includes names that may unblind individual authors and their institutions. For example, if your project is called GoogleDeveloperHelper, which makes it clear the work was done at Google, for the submission version, use the name DeveloperHelper or BigCompanyDeveloperHelper instead;

-Avoid revealing the institution affiliations of authors or at which the work was performed. For example, if the evaluation includes a user study conducted with undergraduates from the CS 101 class that you teach, you might say “The study participants consist of 200 students in an introductory CS course”. You can of course add the institutional information to the camera-ready. Similar suggestions apply to work conducted in specific organizations (e.g., industrial studies). In such cases, avoid mentioning the organization’s name. Instead, you may refer to the organization as Org or Company. When appropriate and when this does not help too much in revealing the company’s name, you might mention the context (e.g., financial organization, videogame development company, etc.);

-Avoid linking directly to code repositories or tool deployments which can reveal your identity. Whenever possible, please use the EasyChair additional material field to submit a .zip or .tgz file including additional material. This is of course possible for small attachments. In other cases, you may post anonymized links (with a warning that the following link may reveal authors’ identities), including links to anonymized code or deployments. When creating such repositories, a good practice can be asking somebody in your team to test the anonymization of the repository and its content. If the anonymization is difficult to achieve and you still want to provide the availability of data/tools, you can simply state that you will link to the code or deployment in the camera-ready version. Program committee members are asked to keep into account the double-blind policy when reviewing papers, and therefore not require full availability of artifacts at submission time.

-SANER 2025 believes in open science and that open science aids reproducibility and replicability. To improve these factors, we encourage authors to consider disclosing the source code and datasets used within their paper, including extractors, survey data, etc. By sharing this information your contribution will be more impactful because others can follow up on your work and cite it. Please consider using Zenodo, Figshare, or other services that provide DOIs and allow anonymous and semi-anonymous methods of archiving software and datasets. Archive.org is recommended for the dissemination of larger datasets. These datasets, anonymized through Zenodo and other services, should be linked within the paper itself. Instructions for double-blind friendly uploading of datasets are available here: https://ineed.coffee/post/how-to-disclose-data-for-double-blind-review-and-make-it-archived-open-data-upon-acceptance.html.

-To submit your paper, please use the same submission link. After clicking on “Make a New Submission,” you will be presented with a list of all available tracks. Be sure to select the correct track (e.g., Short Papers and Posters Track), as illustrated in the attached screenshot.

Important Dates

-Abstract submission deadline: October 04, 2024 AoE

-Paper submission deadline: October 13, 2024 AoE

-Notifications: November 29, 2024 AoE

-Camera Ready: December 20, 2024 AoE