3rd International Workshop on Methodological Issues with Empirical Studies in Software EngineeringWSESE 2026

With the steep increase in empirical studies and the advent of secondary studies that aggregate their results, a main concern is their quality. Although researchers have raised concerns about various quality issues for many years, many of these issues persist, partially due to the complexity of empirical studies in our field—whether human subjects are involved or not. Problems related to appropriate design and the correct usage of statistical methods are crucial for the reliability of the results. Consequently, as a community, we need to better understand these issues and how to mitigate, if not eliminate, them. The workshop’s aim is to increase awareness of the importance of quality and appropriateness in the methods applied during the different stages of software engineering empirical studies to yield reliable results and to disseminate this knowledge to the broader SE community.

Call for Papers

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

• Issues with the motivation and definition of appropriate research questions.
• Issues with the operationalization, e.g., missing standard metrics.
• Issues with the systematic identification of threats to validity and how to address them
• Issues selecting an appropriate study design and the consequences of that selection
• Issues with drawing appropriate conclusions from the findings and generalizing them
• Issues with aggregating results from individual studies
• Issues with reproduction, replication, or families of studies
• Issues with quantitative, qualitative approaches and combined approaches
• Issues with understanding failures and successes: lessons learned
• Issues with automating one or more steps of the empirical process for conducting primary or secondary studies.

Paper categories

Papers must describe original work that has not been submitted to or presented at other forums (although the studies described may have been). Accepted papers will be published in the ICSE workshop proceedings.

• Technical papers (6-8 pages including references): formally describe studies, explain how they were designed and executed to overcome challenges, highlight concrete results, and describe any advances to the state-of-the-art.
• Experience reports / Work in progress (4-6 pages including references) describe the experience in conducting studies and lessons learned that address methodological issues.
• Vision / Position papers (Extended abstracts) (2-4 pages including references) describe new directions in conducting empirical studies including convincing arguments supported by clear rationale.

Submission information

Submissions will be made via hotcrp. Please, note that WSESE does not follow double-anonymous review process. Papers must be formatted according to ICSE 2026 guidelines (submission process: https://conf.researchr.org/track/icse-2026/icse-2026-research-track). The official publication date of the workshop proceedings is the date the proceedings are made available by ACM. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2026. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.