Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

Motivation

Technical Debt is one of the most important metaphors in software evolution. It expresses development shortcuts, taken for expediency but causing the degradation of internal software quality. One of the key aspects of the technical debt metaphor is its nature towards closing the communication gap between technical and non-technical stakeholders in software development teams. The International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt) is the premier conference for managing technical debt in software projects. TechDebt brings together leading software engineering researchers and practitioners to discuss approaches for managing several types of Technical Debt, to share experiences and best practices, and to identify key challenges in industry and academia.

The 7th International Conference on Technical Debt will be held in April 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal. As in previous editions, TechDebt will be co-located with the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2024).

Topics

The TechDebt conference invites significant research contributions to the Technical Track. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Quality assurance activities towards Technical Debt management
• Use of artificial intelligence approaches to support Technical Debt Management
• Human factors and Technical Debt
• Interplay between Software Economics and Technical Debt
• Software visualization for supporting Technical Debt identification and monitoring
• Case studies on (un)successful debt management
• Case studies on (un)successful remediation of Technical, Process, and Social Debt
• Estimation of Principal and Interest of specific kinds of debt
• Frameworks for the estimation of Principal and Interest
• Stakeholders’ concerns on Technical, Process, and Social Debt
• Measurement frameworks to study the components of Technical, Process, and Social Debt
• Methods and tools for monitoring Technical, Process, and Social Debt
• Empirical evidence on Technical, Process, and Social Debt management tools and their accuracy
• Decision frameworks for prioritizing debt items among themselves and against features
• Architectural Technical Debt
• Less studied kinds of Technical Debt: e.g., Requirement, Test, Documentation, Infrastructure, Security Debt
• Comparison and relationships between Technical, Process, and Social Debt and other topics (e.g., DevOps, Machine Learning, etc.)
• Replication studies on Technical Debt

We invite submissions of papers to the Technical Track in any areas related to the theme and goal of the conference in the following categories:

• Research Papers (up to 10 pages): innovative and significant original research in the field
• Experience Papers (up to 10 pages): experience, case studies, challenges, problems, and solutions drawn from the application of technical debt tools and techniques in the industrial context.
• Short Papers (up to 5 pages): early stages of research, including new ideas, visions, and/or reflections; or negative results; or innovative and original tools addressing technical debt issues or aiming at managing technical debt.

Evaluation criteria

Submissions must be original and unpublished work. Each paper submitted to the main Technical Track will undergo a rigorous review process by at least three members of the program committee.

• Relevance: Submission must respond to the Call for Papers.
• Novelty: Is there sufficient originality in the contribution, and is it clearly and correctly explained with respect to the state of the art? Novelty also includes additional evidence for a previously studied problem (e.g., in replications).
• Soundness: Are all claimed contributions supported by the rigorous application of appropriate research methods? Claims should be scoped to what can be supported, and limitations should be discussed.
• Significance: Are contributions evaluated for their importance and impact with respect to the existing body of knowledge? The authors are expected to explicitly argue for the claimed contributions through a comparison with pertinent related work.
• Replicability: Is there sufficient information in the paper for the results to be independently replicated? The evaluation of submissions will take into account the extent to which sufficient information is available to support the full or partial independent replication of the claimed findings. Upon submission to the research track, authors are asked to make their data available (via upload of supplemental material or a link to an anonymous repository) and provide instructions on how to access this data in the paper or to include an explanation as to why this is not possible or desirable; and to indicate if they intend to make their data publicly available upon acceptance.
• Presentation Quality: Are results clearly presented? Submissions are expected to meet high standards of presentation, including adequate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and respect for the formatting instructions.

The weighting and relevance of the above criteria vary for paper types.

Submission process

TechDebt 2024 is using a doubly anonymous reviewing model for the Technical Track. Therefore, all submissions to this track have to fulfill the doubly-anonymous reviewing requirements (refer to the ICSE Q&A for more details). Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk-rejected without further review.

Papers must be submitted electronically via the TechDebtConf2024 HotCRP site (https://techdebt2024.hotcrp.com/). The paper format of TechDebt2024 must follow the ACM formatting guidelines, see also http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template 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,anonymous]{acmart}), and use the ACM reference format for the bibliography (i.e., \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}). To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document: \documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart} and \acmConference[TechDebt 2024]{7th International Conference on Technical Debt}{April 14--15, 2024}{Lisbon, Portugal}.

Submissions may not exceed the number of pages specified above (including all text, references, and figures). The purchase of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.

Open Science policy

Openness in science is key to fostering progress via transparency, reproducibility, and replicability. While all submissions will undergo the same review process independent of whether or not they disclose their analysis code or data, we strongly encourage authors to make data available upon submission (either privately or publicly) and especially upon acceptance (publicly). If the authors cannot disclose industrial or otherwise non-public data, they should provide an explicit (short) statement in the paper.

Accepted papers and attendance expectations

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2024. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

After acceptance, the list of paper authors cannot be changed under any circumstances, and the list of authors on camera-ready papers must be identical to those on submitted papers. After acceptance, paper titles can not be changed except by permission of the Program Co-Chairs, and only then when referees recommend a change for clarity or accuracy with paper content.

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for TechDebt 2024 and present the paper.

Important dates

• Abstract deadline: November 14, 2023
• Paper deadline: November 17, 2023 November 24, 2023
• Author notification: January 10, 2024
• Camera ready deadline: January 28, 2024