The 19th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE 2026) is the premier venue for research on cooperative and human aspects of software engineering. Since 2008, the CHASE conference has served as a community and provided a forum to discuss research, including empirical findings, theoretical models, research methods and tools, and new ideas and visions for studying human and cooperative aspects of software engineering. CHASE seeks to bring together academic and practitioner communities interested in this area. Now in its 19th edition, CHASE 2026 will be co-located with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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 among many people. At the same time, emerging trends in software engineering and artificial intelligence are fundamentally redefining the concepts of cooperation, coordination, communication, and what it means to be human. The CHASE conference seeks to grow a body of knowledge on the important role of people in software development, how people cooperate and 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, and 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: October 16th, 2025, AoE (recommended; used for bidding)
- Paper submission: October 23rd, 2025, AoE
- Notification: January 5th, 2026, AoE
- Camera-ready submission: January 26th, 2026, AoE
Evaluation Criteria
Each paper submitted to CHASE will be evaluated based on the following criteria:
- Soundness: 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 they are true and when they are not.
- Relevance: 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 the 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.
- Verifiability and Transparency: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to understand how it was conducted, e.g., how data was obtained, analyzed, and interpreted. We encourage authors to provide details and material that support independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions.
- Presentation: CHASE is human-oriented, so we expect an easy-to-digest write-up. We recommend using 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.
CHASE 2026 will recommend the adoption of
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 in relation to prior work, and provide strong argumentation as to why that contribution is relevant and valid.
- Extended abstracts (up to 5 pages, including tables, figures, and references): Extended abstracts capture the original spirit of CHASE’s workshop format, fostering dynamic engagement and exchange of ideas among all conference participants. They encompass research proposals, visionary concepts, multi- and interdisciplinary strategies, as well as innovative research methods, designs, and unexplored topics. These papers aim to stimulate thought-provoking discussions and collaborative exploration of new horizons in cooperative and human aspects of software engineering and can be controversial in nature. They capture the need for the community to explore new visions, ideas, and methods as CHASE research progresses and evolves over time. Extended abstracts can also present emerging and/or interim findings, thus providing a forum for introducing fresh insights and preliminary findings in the field and to receive community feedback for progressing the work.
The Program Committee may recommend papers submitted as Full papers to be accepted as Extended Abstracts. The authors may accept these recommendations and participate in CHASE to foster healthy discussion of their ideas.
Page limits mentioned above are inclusive of all figures, tables, appendices, etc.
Call for Contributions
Reviewing Process
- Submissions will be reviewed by at least three reviewers; one of the reviewers will serve as a Discussion Lead.
- CHASE 2026 will not have a rebuttal phase.
- CHASE 2026 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 should 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://chase2026-research.hotcrp.com
Submissions through other channels are not accepted.
- All submissions must be in an accessible PDF.
- Submissions must conform to the ACM Primary Article Template, which can be obtained from the 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}. Note that the ACM format is being used this year, whereas last year it was the IEEE format; hence, the appearance will differ from year to year.
- All submissions, including all figures, tables, appendices, etc., must not exceed the page limit of each track for the main text.
- 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 desk rejection without further review.
- By submitting to CHASE, 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 2026 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for CHASE 2026. 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.
- Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM and IEEE have been involved in ORCID and may collect ORCID IDs from all published authors. We are committed to improving author discoverability, ensuring proper attribution, and contributing to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.
- If the research involves human participants/subjects, the authors must adhere to the ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Upon submitting, authors will declare their compliance with such a policy. 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.
- CHASE 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 2026.
- Authors should not publicly use the submission title during review. Thus, they should use a different paper title for any pre-print in ArXiV or similar websites.
- All communication with the program committee must go through the program committee chairs. Do not contact individual program committee members regarding your submission.
- Links to replication packages and other external resources, including appendices, must be shared through anonymized platforms. For more information, see our open science policies.
- The Q&A page from prior ICSEs provides further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-anonymous review process.
- Starting 2026, all articles published by ACM will be made Open Access. This is greatly beneficial to the advancement of computer science and leads to increased usage and citation of research. Most authors will be covered by ACM OPEN agreements by that point and will not have to pay Article Processing Charges (APC). Check if your institution participates in ACM OPEN. Authors not covered by ACM OPEN agreements may have to pay APC; however, ACM is offering several automated and discretionary APC Waivers and Discounts.
- Submissions must follow the latest policies from IEEE and ACM ( “IEEE Submission and Peer Review Policy", and the “ACM Policy on Authorship", with associated FAQ), which includes a policy specific to the use of generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT.
- 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 2026. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.
- Purchases of additional pages in the proceedings are not allowed.
Open Science Policy
In line with ICSE 2026, CHASE 2026 supports the Open Science policies. The guiding principle is that all research results should be accessible to the public and, if possible, empirical studies should be reproducible. In particular, we actively support the adoption of open artifacts and open source principles. We encourage all contributing authors to disclose (anonymized and curated) data/artifacts to increase reproducibility and replicability. Note that sharing research artifacts is not mandatory for submission or acceptance. However, sharing is expected to be the default, and non-sharing needs to be justified. We recognize that reproducibility or replicability is not a goal in qualitative research and that, similar to industrial studies, qualitative studies often face challenges in sharing research data. For guidelines on how to report qualitative research to ensure the assessment of the reliability and credibility of research results, see this curated Q&A page.
Upon submission to the research track, authors are asked
- to make their artifact available to the program committee (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 it in the submission an explanation as to why this is not possible or desirable; and
- to indicate in the submission why they do not intend to make their data or study materials publicly available upon acceptance, if that is the case. The default understanding is that the data and/or other artifacts will be publicly available upon acceptance of a paper.
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.
- Purchasing additional pages in the proceedings is not possible.