Technical TrackAPSEC 2026

The Technical Track is the core of the conference, serving as the premier venue for high-quality, original research in software engineering. We invite submissions describing significant theoretical, empirical, or experimental advances that push the boundaries of the discipline.

Submissions must present unpublished results and make novel contributions to software engineering research.

Topics of Interest

Solicited topics include, but are not limited to:

Topics of Interest

Solicited topics include, but are not limited to:

• Requirements Engineering Elicitation, specification, analysis, validation, and management; Requirements for emerging systems (AI, cyber-physical, etc.).

• Software Architecture and Design Architectural modeling, patterns, and decision-making; Component-based, service-oriented, and microservices architectures.

• Testing and Verification Automated testing, test generation, and oracles; Model checking, theorem proving, symbolic execution, and runtime verification.

• AI for Software Engineering Machine learning and AI techniques to support code generation, testing, debugging, refactoring, and maintenance; Intelligent tools, recommendation systems, and automation in SE.

• Software Engineering for AI Methods, processes, and tools for developing, deploying, and maintaining reliable AI/ML systems; Quality assurance, testing, and evolution of AI-enabled software.

• Security Secure software development, vulnerability detection, and mitigation; Privacy-preserving techniques, secure-by-design approaches.

• Software Maintenance and Evolution Refactoring, program comprehension, reverse engineering; Legacy system migration, technical debt management, and long-term evolution.

We also welcome submissions on emerging and cross-cutting topics in modern software engineering.

Broad Application Domains

Submissions addressing innovative software engineering challenges in diverse domains are encouraged, including (but not limited to) mobile systems, cloud computing, embedded and cyber-physical systems, AI-intensive applications, IoT, and blockchain-based software.

Join leading researchers from around the world in presenting groundbreaking work and shaping the future of software engineering!

Call for Papers

Technical Track

The Technical Track is the core of the conference, providing a premier forum for researchers, practitioners, and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, and significant advances in software engineering and its sub-disciplines.

We invite high-quality submissions describing original and unpublished results on theoretical, empirical, or experimental software engineering research. Submissions must present novel contributions that advance the state of the art in the field.

Topics of Interest

Solicited topics include, but are not limited to:

• Requirements Engineering
  Elicitation, specification, analysis, validation, and management;
  Requirements for emerging systems (AI, cyber-physical, etc.).

• Software Architecture and Design
  Architectural modeling, patterns, and decision-making;
  Component-based, service-oriented, and microservices architectures.

• Testing and Verification
  Automated testing, test generation, and oracles;
  Model checking, theorem proving, symbolic execution, and runtime verification.

• AI for Software Engineering
  Machine learning and AI techniques to support code generation, testing, debugging, refactoring, and maintenance;
  Intelligent tools, recommendation systems, and automation in SE.

• Software Engineering for AI
  Methods, processes, and tools for developing, deploying, and maintaining reliable AI/ML systems;
  Quality assurance, testing, and evolution of AI-enabled software.

• Security
  Secure software development, vulnerability detection, and mitigation;
  Privacy-preserving techniques, secure-by-design approaches.

• Software Maintenance and Evolution
  Refactoring, program comprehension, reverse engineering;
  Legacy system migration, technical debt management, and long-term evolution.

We also welcome submissions on emerging and cross-cutting topics in modern software engineering.

Broad Application Domains

Submissions addressing innovative software engineering challenges in diverse domains are encouraged, including (but not limited to) mobile systems, cloud computing, embedded and cyber-physical systems, AI-intensive applications, IoT, and blockchain-based software.

Evaluation Criteria

Technical research papers must not exceed 10 pages (including references; check final guidelines for exact limits). Submissions will be evaluated by at least three program committee members based on novelty, originality, technical soundness, significance to the field, proper use of research methods, clarity of presentation, and relevance.

Submission Instructions

• All submissions must be original and not previously published or under review elsewhere.
• Papers must be in English, PDF format, A4 size, and conform to the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font, full text in 10pt font; LaTeX users: \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without compsoc options).
• Submissions must comply with the IEEE Policy on Authorship.
• The review process is double-blind: authors must not reveal their identities in the paper (see double-blind instructions carefully).
• The Chairs reserve the right to desk-reject non-compliant or out-of-scope submissions.

Submission Link

Papers must be submitted electronically via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=apsec2026

Key Dates (Tentative)

• Abstract Submission Deadline: July 6, 2026
• Paper Submission Deadline: July 13, 2026
• Author Notification: September 14, 2026
• Camera-Ready Deadline: October 19, 2026

Accepted Papers

All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and submitted for inclusion in IEEE Xplore, ensuring wide dissemination and archival visibility. Authors must register and present their work at the conference; failure to do so may result in removal from the proceedings. No changes to author lists or titles are allowed post-acceptance without Program Co-Chairs’ approval.

Affiliated Journal Special Issue

Selected papers will be invited to submit extended versions to the following special issue:

Automated Software Engineering (AUSE) (Springer)

• Special Issue: APSEC 2026
• Publisher: Springer
• Journal URL: https://link.springer.com/journal/10515
• Impact Factor: 3.1 (2024)

Conference Attendance Expectation

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference and present the work in person or virtually (as per conference format).

Contact

For questions regarding the Technical Track, please contact the Program Co-Chairs:

• In-Young Ko (iko@kaist.ac.kr)
• Bayu Priyambada (bayu_priyambadha@ub.ac.id)

We look forward to your innovative contributions and to welcoming you to the conference!

Double-Blind Reviewing Policy

IMPORTANT: The Technical Track uses a double-blind reviewing process. This means that author identities must remain hidden from reviewers throughout the review process. Authors are required to make every reasonable effort to preserve anonymity and must follow these guidelines carefully. Submissions that violate the double-blind rules risk being desk-rejected without review.

These instructions are adapted from established double-blind practices (similar to those used in APSEC and other leading software engineering conferences).

Rules for Anonymizing Submissions

• Omit author names and affiliations from the title page and throughout the paper. Do not include author information, institution names, or any identifying headers/footers.

• Cite your own related work in the third person.
  Incorrect: “We build on our previous work [10]…”
  Correct: “We build on the work of [10]…”
  This applies to all self-references.

• Anonymize references when necessary.
  If a submission is a clear follow-up to your prior published work and third-person citation would still obviously reveal authorship, you may anonymize the reference itself at submission time.
  Example:
  “Based on previous results [10]”
  Reference entry: “[10] Anonymous Authors. Omitted for double-blind reviewing.”
  Important: The submitted paper must remain self-contained and understandable without requiring access to the anonymized prior work. Reviewers will not be asked to read external papers to evaluate your submission.

• Do not include acknowledgements that could reveal identity (e.g., funding sources, grants, collaborators, institutions, or thanks to specific individuals). These may be added in the camera-ready version after acceptance.

• Avoid identifiable naming conventions.
  If your work uses a project name, tool name, dataset name, or acronym that could link back to you or your institution (e.g., “GoogleDeveloperHelper” or “MalangSELabTool”), rename it for the submission.
  Example: Change to “DeveloperHelper” or “GenericSELabTool” and note (if needed) that the name has been altered for double-blind reviewing.

• Anonymize institutional or contextual details.
  Instead of: “We conducted a user study with 200 undergraduates from our CS101 class at University X.”
  Use: “We conducted a user study with 200 students in an introductory computer science course.”
  For industry/organizational studies: Refer to the entity generically (e.g., “a large financial organization”, “a video game development company”, “Company A”) rather than naming it.
  Specific details that do not risk unblinding may be included if they are essential to understanding the contribution.

• Open Science and Artifact Sharing (Encouraged but Anonymized)
  We strongly support open science to promote reproducibility and impact. Authors are encouraged to share source code, datasets, scripts, survey instruments, and other artifacts.
  However, do not link directly to personal GitHub repositories, institutional pages, or any resource that could reveal identity.
  Instead, use anonymous or semi-anonymous archiving services such as:

• Zenodo (provides DOIs)
• Figshare
• Archive.org (especially for larger datasets)
  Upload your materials anonymously, obtain a DOI or permanent link, and reference it in the paper (e.g., “The replication package is available at [DOI link]”).
  These links should appear in the submitted paper itself.

Additional Advice

• Review your entire paper (including figures, captions, appendices, and supplementary material) for any accidental leaks of identity.
• When in doubt, err on the side of more anonymization.
• The Program Co-Chairs reserve the right to desk-reject submissions that do not adequately anonymize author identities.

Questions about the double-blind policy? Contact the Technical Track Program Co-Chairs:
- In-Young Ko (iko@kaist.ac.kr) - Bayu Priyambada (bayu_priyambadha@ub.ac.id)

By following these guidelines, you help ensure a fair, unbiased, and high-quality review process for all submissions.

To ensure a fair and unbiased double-blind review process, authors submitting papers to the Technical Track must comply with the following guidelines regarding the handling of non-anonymized versions. A non-anonymized version is considered any publicly available document (e.g., on arXiv, ResearchGate, personal websites, or institutional repositories) that contains essentially the same scientific content as the submitted paper, even if it differs in minor ways such as the title, paper structure or organization, length, or formatting.

Preprints Posted Before the Anonymity Period

Authors are permitted to make a non-anonymized version of their paper publicly available before the anonymity period.

The anonymity period starts one month before the submission deadline and ends when the paper is accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

However, in such cases, authors are responsible for minimizing the risk that reviewers can trivially link the submitted paper to a public version.

Specifically, authors must:

• Take care to prevent the submitted manuscript from being associated with the non-anonymized version.
• Not make the non-anonymized version easily discoverable via search engines by reusing distinctive phrases (e.g., title, keywords, or unique sentences) from the submitted manuscript.
• Not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period.
• Not actively promote the non-anonymized version (e.g., via social media, blogs, mailing lists, or talks).
• Not reference, cite, or link to any non-anonymized version within the submitted manuscript.

Post-Publication Preprint Policy According to IEEE Guidelines

Upon acceptance and publication of a paper by IEEE, authors must update any publicly available non-anonymized version of the paper in one of the following ways:

• Replace it with the full IEEE citation, including the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), or
• Post the accepted version of the paper (i.e., the author’s final version prior to IEEE formatting), along with the DOI.
  The IEEE-published version must not be posted.

IEEE will provide each author with a preprint version of the article that includes the DOI, the IEEE copyright notice, and a statement confirming that the article has been accepted for publication by IEEE. Authors may post this preprint version in accordance with IEEE’s posting guidelines.

For more details, please refer to:
Post Your Paper - IEEE Author Center Conferences

Authors are expected to follow these policies strictly to maintain the integrity of the double-blind review process and to comply with IEEE publication requirements.

All submissions must be the original work of the listed authors.

The use of AI-based tools is permitted only for minor linguistic assistance, such as grammar correction, spelling correction, and improving clarity of writing. However, the use of generative AI tools to produce or substantially generate original research content, scientific claims, experimental results, analysis, or manuscript text is strictly prohibited.

By submitting a paper, authors confirm that:

• The submission is an original work created by the listed authors.
• The core intellectual contributions, including the research ideas, methodology, results, and conclusions, were developed by the authors.
• The paper is not generated (fully or partially) by generative AI tools in a way that replaces author originality.

Violations of this policy may result in desk rejection, removal from the proceedings, and reporting to the authors’ institutions or funding bodies where appropriate.