Full PapersCHASE 2024

The 17th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE 2024) is the premier venue for research on cooperative and human aspects of software engineering. Since 2008, the CHASE conference has provided a forum to discuss research results long before “human values” started to draw attention in the mainstream software engineering community, including empirical findings, theoretical models, and research methods and tools for studying human and cooperative aspects in software engineering. CHASE seeks to bring together academic and practitioner communities interested in this area. Now in its 17th edition, CHASE 2024 will be co-located with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in beautiful Lisboa, Portugal.

People vary widely with respect to their personality traits, emotional and cognitive style, technical knowledge, and other demographic variables including age, gender, and cultural background. Software projects require effective communication and collaboration of many people. The CHASE conference seeks to grow a body of knowledge on the important role of people in software development, how people cooperate, collaborate to design and develop software systems, and how these processes can be improved.

CHASE solicits high-quality research studies using any research method that is appropriate for the purpose, that seek to learn about cooperative and human aspects of software engineering. While CHASE acknowledges the important role of technology in the socio-technical discipline that software engineering is, the focus lies on the human aspects, not the technology.

Scope

Topics of interest are human, cooperative, and collaborative aspects of software engineering including, but not limited to:

• 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.
• Software Engineering, AI, and humans, including the effects of AI on software activities, developers’ perceptions of AI tool integration, emergence of new tools and roles due to AI, prompt engineering in Large Language Models (LLM).
• Datasets that can lay a foundation for future research on human aspects of software engineering.
• Replication studies of studies that fit the CHASE scope.
• Meta-research studies that fit the CHASE scope.

Important Dates

• Abstract submission: November 1st, 2023, AoE (recommended; used for bidding)
• Paper submission: November 10th, 2023, AoE (firm, no extensions)
• Notification: January 10th 2024, AoE
• Camera-ready submission: January 28th, 2024, AoE
• CHASE conference: April 14-15th, 2024

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

Evaluation criteria for submissions

1. CHASE expects and values relevance, both practical and theoretical. Papers should present a clear motivation, whether that is a practical problem, a need to develop more theoretical foundations, or argue for replication of previously published studies. CHASE encourages submission of replication papers. No matter what the contribution of a paper is, it must clearly discuss the implications of the results for software engineering research and/or practice, whether those results are empirical findings or products of theorizing.
2. CHASE requires soundness. All research requires assumptions. An assumption can be reliable, reasonable, risky, or ridiculous. Soundness means to allow only reliable assumptions to remain implicit. State all reasonable assumptions. State and thoroughly discuss all risky assumptions. Be especially careful when interpreting or generalizing. CHASE will accept risky assumptions or conjectures as long as a) they are clearly marked as such, b) they are needed to enable higher relevance, and c) you convince the reviewers they are often true. Future research may show when and when not they are true.
3. CHASE is human-oriented, so we expect an easy-to-digest write-up. We recommend to: use a structured abstract (Background, Objective, Method, Results, Conclusion); define key terms; write clearly and concisely; consider using appropriate color schemes, symbols, boxes; provide tables and figures to reduce prose; provide cross-references; do not repeat sentences between abstract, introduction, and conclusion.
4. CHASE 2024 will adopt the ACM Empirical Standard for the respective research methods used. We advise both authors and reviewers to review these.

Tracks (submission types)

• Full papers (up to 10 pages + 2 additional pages for references). Full papers must present mature research. They must clearly state a contribution, demonstrate novelty with relation to prior work, and provide strong argumentation why that contribution is relevant and valid.

• Short papers (up to 5 pages plus one for references): Short papers capture the original spirit of CHASE’s workshop format, fostering dynamic engagement and exchange of ideas among all conference participants. Short papers can encompass research proposals, visionary concepts, multi- and interdisciplinary strategies, as well as innovative research designs and unexplored topics. These papers should aim to stimulate thought-provoking discussions and collaborative exploration of new horizons in cooperative and human aspects of software engineering. We also encourage the submission of short papers detailing emerging results, providing a forum for introducing fresh insights and preliminary findings in the field.

CHASE meets TOSEM

CHASE is proud to announce a partnership with ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), one of the leading journals in software engineering and ACM’s flagship journal in the field, through the launch of two innovative initiatives.

The first initiative is a JournalFast Track for selected CHASE full papers. This option provides authors with an accelerated review process for their work in TOSEM, ensuring consistent reviewer feedback from the conference to the journal. We will provide more details in early 2024.

The second initiative introduces a Journal-First Track for invited TOSEM papers on CHASE-related themes. This feature encourages a productive exchange between journal articles and conference presentations, thereby stimulating a more comprehensive conversation on pivotal topics. The Journal-First chair will invite authors of relevant TOSEM papers. There is no mechanism to submit a paper to the track without invitation.

These initiatives, collectively, aim to nurture collaboration, instigate wide-ranging discussions, and uphold the standards of high-quality research in both venues.

Reviewing process

• Submissions will be reviewed by at least three reviewers; one of the reviewers will serve as a Discussion Lead.
• CHASE 2024 will not have a rebuttal phase.
• CHASE 2024 uses double-anonymous reviewing, but reviewers are allowed to sign their reviews if they prefer. Please see further details below (Submission Process and Submission Link).
• Reviewers must respect the “Invalid Criticisms” item lists of the ACM Empirical Standard for the respective research methods used.
• We will adhere to the ACM Policy Against Harassment at ACM Activities
• Submissions that are deemed out of scope will be desk rejected without further review.

Submission Process and Submission Link

All papers must be submitted via HotCRP before or on the submission date: https://chase2024.hotcrp.com. Submissions through other channels are not accepted.

All authors should use the official “ACM Primary Article Template”, available here: ACM Proceedings Template page. LaTeX users should use the sigconf option, as well as the review (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers) and anonymous (omitting author names) options. To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document:

\documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart}

\acmConference[ICSE 2024]{46th International Conference on Software Engineering}{April 2024}{Lisbon, Portugal}

• All submissions must be in PDF. Accepted papers will be allowed one extra page for the main text of the camera-ready version.
• Submissions must strictly conform to the ACM conference proceedings formatting instructions specified above. Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in immediate desk rejection without further peer-review. If in doubt, please contact the Program Chairs.
• By submitting to CHASE 2024, 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. Papers submitted to CHASE 2024 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for CHASE 2024. 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.
• By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.
• Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID identifier, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper.
• CHASE 2024 will employ a double-anonymous review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-anonymous review process. In particular:
  • Authors’ names must be omitted from the submission.
  • All references to the author’s prior work should be in the third person.
  • While authors have the right to upload preprints on ArXiV or similar sites, they must avoid specifying that the manuscript was submitted to CHASE 2024.
  • During review, authors should not publicly use the submission title. They should thus use a different paper title for any pre-print in ArXiV or similar websites.
  • Links to replication packages and other external resources including appendices must be shared through anonymized platforms, see our open science policies.
• Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-anonymous review process can be found in the Q&A page from prior ICSEs.
• By submitting to the CHASE, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM, and the authorship policy of the IEEE.

Open Science Policy

CHASE supports the adoption of open science principles. Indeed, we consider replicability as an explicit evaluation criterion. We expect all contributing authors to disclose the (anonymized and curated) data to increase reproducibility, replicability, and/or recoverability of the studies, provided that there are no ethical, legal, technical, economic, or sensible barriers preventing the disclosure. Please provide a supporting statement on the data availability in your submitted paper, including an argument for why (some of) the data cannot be made available, if that is the case.

Specifically, we expect all 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.
• Fostering artifacts as open data and open source should be archived on preserved digital repositories such as zenodo.org, figshare.com, www.softwareheritage.org, osf.io, or institutional repositories. GitHub, GitLab, and similar services for version control systems do not offer properly archived and preserved data. Personal or institutional websites, consumer cloud storage such as Dropbox, or services such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate.net may not provide properly archived and preserved data and may increase the risk of violating anonymity if used at submission time.
• Data should be released under a recognized open data license, such as the CC0 dedication or the CC-BY 4.0 license when publishing the data.
• Software should be released under an open source license.
• Alternative open licenses, if mandated by institutions or regulations, are also permitted.

We encourage authors to make artifacts available upon submission (either privately or publicly) and upon acceptance (publicly).

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 anonymized. Authors wanting to share GitHub repositories may also look into using https://anonymous.4open.science/, which is an open source tool that helps you to quickly double-anonymize your repository.

HOWTOs

A step-by-step approach to disclosing artifacts for (double-blind) peer review and make it open data upon acceptance is available at: https://ineed.coffee/5205/how-to-disclose-data-for-double-blind-review-and-make-it-archived-open-data-upon-acceptance/.

A step-by-step approach to automatically archive a GitHub repository to Zenodo.org is available at https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/.

A step-by-step approach to automatically archive a GitHub repository to figshare.com is available at https://knowledge.figshare.com/articles/item/how-to-connect-figshare-with-your-github-account.

A proposal for artifact evaluation by SIGSOFT is available at https://github.com/acmsigsoft/artifact-evaluation.

A proposal for open science in software engineering, including explanations for structuring an open artifact, is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.06499.

Publication and Presentation

• Authors of accepted papers are encouraged to share preprints of their work.
• Upon acceptance, all authors of accepted papers will be asked to complete a Copyright form and will receive further instructions for preparing their camera-ready versions.
• At least one author of each paper must register and present the paper at the conference; otherwise the paper will be excluded from the program and removed from the proceedings. Authors of accepted papers will receive further instructions about paper presentations in due course.
• All accepted papers will be published in the conference electronic proceedings, which will also be available in the ACM and IEEE Digital Library. The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM or IEEE Digital Libraries. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2024. The official publication date affects the due date for any patent filings related to published work.
• Purchasing additional pages in the proceedings is not possible.