Research TrackCHASE 2023

The 16th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE 2023) is a high-quality scientific venue for research related to the cooperative and human aspects of software engineering. The CHASE conference provides a unified forum for discussing high-quality research studies, models, methods, and tools for human and cooperative aspects of software engineering. We provide a meeting place for academic, industry, and practitioner communities interested in this area, and for those who are curious to see what it is all about. In its 16th edition, CHASE will be co-located with ICSE in the beautiful city of Melbourne in Australia.

We know that human beings vary widely with respect to their emotional and cognitive style, age, gender, cultural background, and technical knowledge. And yet they need to cooperate effectively in developing software, often from a distance. At CHASE, researchers believe software engineering can learn a lot from investigating how those diverse humans cooperate and collaborate to design and develop software. We aim to find out how they achieve it and what researchers can do to help them collaborate and coordinate in a better and easier way.

CHASE welcomes research using any research method that is appropriate for the purpose, if it is focused on learning about cooperative and human aspects of software engineering. The research should predominantly study humans, not technology.

Scope

Topics of interest are about the human, cooperative, and collaborative aspects of software engineering such as:

• Social, psychological, emotional, cognitive, and human-centric aspects of software development, whether at the levels of individual, pair, group, team, organization, or community.
• Social and human aspects of work from anywhere (WFX), remote, and hybrid settings in software development.
• Roles, practices, conventions, patterns of behavior, whether in technical or non-technical activities and whether in generic or specialized domains.
• Issues of leadership, (self-)organization, cooperation, culture, management, socio-technical (in)congruence, stakeholder groups.
• Processes and tools (whether existing, prototypical or simulated) to support teamwork and participation among software engineering stakeholders, whether co-located or distributed.
• Role of soft skills (e.g., communication, collaboration, teamwork, organization, negotiation, conflict management) for software engineers.
• Ethics, moral principles, and techniques intended to inform the development and responsible use of AI/ML-enabled systems.
• Research on designing and using technologies that affect software development groups, organizations, and communities (e.g., Open Source, knowledge-sharing communities, crowdsourcing, etc).
• Equity, diversity, and inclusion (e.g. gender, race, ethnicity, disability, socioeconomic background, sexual orientation, etc., fostering inclusion, allyship, covering, privilege, organizational culture) in software engineering.
• Educational and training related to human and cooperative aspects of software engineering.
• Meta-research about any of these.

Contribution Types

Full Papers

CHASE is the premier forum for presenting and discussing the most recent and significant technical research contributions in the field of cooperation and human aspects of software engineering. We invite high quality submissions of full research papers describing original and unpublished results. A selection of the best papers will be invited to an Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) Special Issue.

Scope

CHASE is a high-quality outlet. Full papers must present mature, human-oriented research. They must clearly state a contribution and provide strong argumentation why that contribution is relevant and valid. Also, CHASE expects and values relevance. Clearly argue what is novel about your contribution and how it can advance the knowledge on cooperation and human aspects in software engineering.

Evaluation criteria

Full research papers are expected to describe new methodologies and/or provide novel research results, and should be evaluated scientifically. Relevant review criteria are the following:

• Novelty: of the results, methodology, etc;
• Soundness of approach: the validity of the rationale;
• Impact: the potential for disruption of current practice in software engineering;
• Quality of presentation: Strong research with a weak presentation may well be rejected.
• Clarity of relation with related work: Papers must be aware of existing work, including gaps, conflicts, and open questions left from prior research.
• Quality of evaluation: Papers are expected to have a high degree of technical rigor.
• Ability to replicate: Research output should be (easy to) reproduce.

Length

Full papers are up to 10 pages long plus two for references.

New Ideas & Emerging Results (NIER)

The New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) track at CHASE provides a vibrant forum for forward-looking, innovative research on human aspects of software engineering. Our aim is to accelerate the exposure of the software engineering community to early yet potentially ground-breaking research results, and to techniques and perspectives that challenge the status quo in the discipline. To broadly capture this goal, the NIER track of CHASE 2023 seeks the following types of papers.

• Forward-looking ideas: exciting new directions or techniques that may have yet to be supported by solid experimental results, but nonetheless supported by strong and well-argued scientific intuitions.
• Thought-provoking reflections: bold and unexpected results and reflections that can help us look at current research directions under a new light, calling for new directions for future research.

Scope

A NIER track paper is not just a scaled-down version of a CHASE full research track paper. The NIER track is reserved for first class, top quality technical contributions, which deserve and will undergo the same high-quality review process of the full papers research track.

Evaluation criteria

Each submission will be reviewed and evaluated in terms of the following quality criteria:

• Value: whether the problem is worth exploring;
• Novelty: of the results, methodology, etc;
• Impact: the potential for disruption of current practice in software engineering;
• Soundness: the validity of the rationale;
• Quality: the overall quality of the paper’s writing

Length

NIER papers are up to 5 pages long plus one for references.

Other Tracks

Besides the Research track, CHASE 2023 welcomes submissions to three other tracks:

Vote Items

Vote Items present a single idea, often a conjecture, for focused feedback from the community. Conference participants will be asked to vote, either in a vote item short-presentation session or outside. CHASE organizers will coordinate use of a common voting system.

For all the details, please refer to the page dedicated to this track: https://conf.researchr.org/track/chase-2023/chase-2023-vote-items

Registered Reports

This year, CHASE is starting the Registered Reports (RR) track in conjunction with the Empirical Software Engineering journal (EMSE). RR for CHASE is particularly directed towards our CHASE community, with cooperative and human aspects of software engineering in mind. In addition to the typical SE topics, we welcome surveys, human studies, and social data analysis.

For all the details, please refer to the page dedicated to this track: https://conf.researchr.org/track/chase-2023/chase-2023-rr

Journal First

This year, CHASE has decided to incorporate into its program journal-first (J1C2) papers accepted at prestigious software engineering venues. Through this initiative, authors of journal-first papers accepted in select journals will be invited to present their work at CHASE, thus providing an opportunity for the authors to engage directly with the community and offering the CHASE attendees an additional dimension to the research track program.

For all the details, please refer to the page dedicated to this track: https://conf.researchr.org/track/chase-2023/chase-2023-j1c2

Reviewing process

• Submissions will be reviewed by three reviewers.
• CHASE uses double-anonymous reviewing, but reviewers are allowed to sign their reviews if they want to. Authors must not directly identify themselves: They must not print their names on initial submissions and must refer to their own work in the third person throughout – the goal is to allow reviewers to ignore who you are. See also “Double-Anonymous Submissions” in the ICSE 2023 Q&A page. Supplementary material must also conform to the double-blind policy; consider the advice at https://ineed.coffee/5205.
• Reviewers must respect the “Invalid Criticisms” item lists of the ACM Empirical Standard for the respective research methods used.

Formatting & Submission

When submitting via HotCRP, make sure to select the appropriate track. Follow the submission link below.

Submissions 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).

• Submissions must strictly conform to the IEEE conference proceedings formatting instructions specified above. Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in desk rejection without further review.
• By submitting to CHASE 2023, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. In particular, papers submitted to CHASE 2023 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for CHASE 2023. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate action will be taken in all such cases. To check for double submission and plagiarism issues, the chairs reserve the right to (1) share the list of submissions with the PC Chairs of other conferences with overlapping review periods and (2) use external plagiarism detection software, under contract to the ACM or IEEE, to detect violations of these policies.
• Upon notification of acceptance, all authors of accepted papers will be asked to fill a copyright form and will receive further instructions for preparing the camera-ready version of their papers. All accepted contributions will be published in the electronic proceedings of the conference.

Submission site: https://icse2023-chase.hotcrp.com/paper/new.

Open Science Policy

Openness in science is key to fostering progress via transparency, reproducibility and replicability. Our steering principle is that all research output should be accessible to the public and that empirical studies should be reproducible. In particular, we actively support the adoption of open data and open source principles. The following guidelines are recommendations and not mandatory. Your choice to use open science or not will not affect the review process for your paper. However, to increase reproducibility and replicability, we encourage all contributing authors to disclose:

• The source code of relevant software used or proposed in the paper, including that used to retrieve and analyze data
• The data used in the paper (e.g., evaluation data, anonymized survey data, etc.)
• Instructions for other researchers describing how to reproduce or replicate the results

Already upon submission, authors can privately share their anonymized data and software on preserved archives, such as Zenodo or Figshare (tutorial available here, please make sure that any links shared during peer review are anonymized). Zenodo accepts up to 50GB per dataset (more upon request). There is no need to use Dropbox or Google Drive. Once accepted, an option can be toggled to publish the data and scripts with an official DOI. Zenodo and Figshare accounts can easily be linked with GitHub repositories to automatically archive software releases. In the unlikely case that authors need to upload terabytes of data, <Archive.org> may be used.

After acceptance, we encourage authors to self-archive pre-prints of their papers in open, preserved repositories such as arXiv.org. This is legal and allowed by all major publishers, including ACM and IEEE, and it lets anybody in the world reach your paper. Note that you are usually not allowed to self-archive the PDF of the published article (that is, the publisher proof or the Digital Library version). Instead, use the manuscript with reviewer comments addressed, but before applying the camera-ready instructions and templates. Feel free to contact the CHASE 2023 PC or Proceedings Chair for more details. We recognize that anonymizing artifacts such as source code is more difficult than preserving anonymity in a paper. We ask authors to take a best effort approach to not reveal their identities. We will also ask reviewers to avoid trying to identify authors by looking at commit histories and other such information that is not easily anonymised.

Authors wanting to share GitHub repositories may want to look into using https://anonymous.4open.science, which is an open source tool that helps you to quickly double-blind your repository. Please note that the success of the open science initiative depends on the willingness (and possibilities) of authors to disclose their data and that all submissions will undergo the same review process independent of whether or not they disclose their analysis code or data.

We encourage authors who cannot disclose industrial or otherwise non-public data, for instance, due to non-disclosure agreements, to provide an explicit (short) statement in the paper.

Accepted Papers and Attendance Expectation

After acceptance, the list of paper authors can not 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 CHASE 2023 and present the paper. We will add more info on this as soon as the CHASE 2023 program and format are finalized.

Important Dates

• Abstract submission: 4 January 2023, AoE (not mandatory)
• Paper submission: 9 Jan 2023, AoE extended to 17 Jan 2023, AoE
• Notification: 21 February 2023, AoE on or before 28 February 2023, AoE
• Camera-ready submission: 13 March 2023, AoE 20 March 2023, AoE

All submission dates are at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12).

Accepted Papers