ESEM - Software Engineering in Practice TrackESEIW 2026

Call for Papers

The ESEM Software Engineering in Practice (SEIP) track is a forum for practitioners and researchers to share experiences applying and evaluating software engineering processes, methods, and tools in real-world settings. Submissions are peer-reviewed primarily for relevance and interest to the community with a particular focus on actionability and practical impact. At least one non-academic author who has made a material contribution to the work is required. We encourage submissions written by practitioners for practitioners and submissions on the human, organizational, and societal dimensions of software engineering practice, including topics related to ethics, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Topics of interest (illustrative, not exhaustive):

• Application of advanced tools, methods, and AI-enabled solutions in practice
• DevOps, DataOps, and MLOps adoption
• Technical debt management and refactoring
• Process, tool, and process assessment and improvement
• Metrics, OKRs, and measurement in practice
• Industry/academia collaboration and knowledge exchange
• Compliance and regulation (e.g., safety-critical systems, cybersecurity, privacy)
• Open-source communities and software ecosystems
• Workforce development and onboarding
• Software engineering for health, wellbeing, and societal impact

Submission Types

We accept two types of submissions:

Short papers (up to 10 pages): Experience reports, lessons learned, or preliminary empirical findings from practice. Should describe the motivation, context, challenges, outcomes, and takeaways.

Full papers (up to 17 pages): In-depth empirical studies conducted in industry, government, or community settings. Should include related work, methodology, results, and discussion of implications. Replication studies and studies with negative results are welcome.

The page limits refer to the main content. For full papers, authors can use an additional 3 pages for references, acknowledgements (optional), and appendices (optional). For short papers, they can use an additional 2 pages.

Accepted papers will be presented at the conference and included in the ESEM proceedings.

How to Submit

Submissions must be written in English, submitted as PDF, and formatted according to the Dagstuhl LIPIcs author guidelines/format.

For details, see the LIPIcs author guidelines (https://submission.dagstuhl.de/styles/instructions/lipics). Examples of papers in this style can be found on the LIPIcs series page (https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/series/LIPIcs). Relevant Overleaf templates may be used as long as they comply with the official LIPIcs style.

Submission link: Will be provided soon!

The ESEM 2026 SEIP track employs a single-blind review process. All submissions will be peer-reviewed by at least three experts from the international program committee and will receive a meta-review.

Finally, please note that each accepted paper in the SEIP track must have at least one author registered as a full (non-student) participant by the camera-ready submission deadline and be presented on-site by one of the authors. Failure to meet these criteria will result in the paper’s removal from the proceedings.

Important Dates

(All dates are end of the day, anywhere on earth)

• Abstract: 20 May 2026 (Wednesday)
• Submission: 27 May 2026 (Wednesday)
• Notification: 08 July 2026 (Wednesday)
• Camera-ready: 05 August 2026 (Wednesday)