Journal First Track
TechDebt invites presentations of journal papers that have been published in one of the following participating journals.
- Empirical Software Engineering
- Information and Software Technology
- Journal of Software: Evolution and Process
- Journal of Systems and Software
- Automated Software Engineering Journal
- Software Quality Journal
- IEEE Software
- European Journal of Information Systems
- Science of Computer Programming
- ACM Transactions on Computing Education
Eligibility Criteria
To be eligible to participate in the Journal First (J1) program, a paper must:
- Be in the scope of the conference, that is, the paper should describe work related to approaches for managing various types of Technical Debt.
- Be accepted in one of the partner journals listed above between January 1, 2026, and the J1 track deadline (see below). Evidence of acceptance should be a copy of the acceptance email (or an equivalent document).
- Report research results that were not previously reported in prior work (conferences, workshops, etc.). Journal versions of papers extending conference papers are thus out of the scope of the track regardless of the size of the extension.
- Not be a secondary study (e.g., systematic reviews, mapping studies, literature surveys, meta-research), editorial, column, or opinion article.
- Not have already been presented, or currently be under consideration for, J1 or similar tracks of TechDebt or other conferences.
How to Submit
Interested authors should submit a proposal of up to 2 pages including references. The submission must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options).
The proposal should consist of the paper title, author names, a pointer to the original journal paper at the journal’s website or alternatively a picture of the acceptance email with the acceptance date, and a short statement on how the work satisfies the J1 criteria. Please upload a single PDF file with the proposal and the accepted paper attached at the end of the file.
Evaluation
The J1 chairs will evaluate all submissions. They will also determine whether the proposals are within the scope of the TechDebt conference and fulfil the eligibility criteria mentioned above.
Presentation
At least one author of each accepted J1 contribution must register and attend the conference to present the paper.
The J1 papers will not be part of the conference proceedings. However, the conference online program will contain a hyperlink to the journal paper (if already published) or, in case the paper has not been published yet, to its preprint (if available).
For any questions, please contact the track chairs.
Important Dates
- Paper submission deadline: January 15, 2027
- Notification to authors: January 24, 2027
Submission Link
Please use the following link: https://techdebt2027-jf.hotcrp.com/