These papers should promote current work in progress on research and practice and should clearly state the longer-term objectives and planned work. Papers on emerging results should communicate initial research results for which there is not yet a complete evaluation. The primary purpose of such papers is the communication of new ideas to obtain early feedback from the empirical software engineering community. The track also welcomes vision papers which will be on long-term challenges and opportunities in empirical software engineering research that are outside of current mainstream topics of the field. The goal of vision papers is to describe how empirical software engineering research and practice will look at least ten years from now.
General Scope of Submissions
Submissions should not be under consideration for publication or presentation elsewhere.
In addition to the specific scope of this track, submissions may address any aspect of software engineering but must tackle the problem from an empirical perspective and using a rigorous empirical method, including:
- Empirical studies using qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods
- Cross- and multi-disciplinary methods and studies
- Experiments and quasi-experiments
- Case studies, action research, ethnography and field studies
- Survey research
- Simulation
- Artifact studies
- Data mining, machine learning, and AI-based approaches
- Secondary and tertiary studies including
- Systematic literature reviews and rapid reviews that include a strong synthesis part
- Meta-analyses, and qualitative, quantitative or structured syntheses of studies
- Replication of empirical studies and families of studies
Topics commonly addressed using an empirical approach include, but are not limited to:
- Evaluation and comparison of software technologies
- Evaluation and comparison of software development methods, techniques, and practices
- Modeling, measuring, and assessing product and/or process quality
- Modeling, measuring, and assessing software development productivity
- Defect and quality prediction
- Software cost and size estimation
- Software evolution
- Software verification and validation, including analysis and testing
- Evaluation and modeling of contemporary software systems (IoT, Industry 4.0, Context–
- Awareness Systems, Cyber-physical, among others)
- Human factors, teamwork, and behavioral aspects of software engineering
We welcome submissions on these meta-topics:
- Development, evaluation, and comparison of empirical approaches and methods
- Infrastructure for conducting empirical studies
- Techniques and tools for supporting empirical studies
- Empirically-based decision making
We also welcome submissions that:
- demonstrate multi-disciplinary work,
- transfer and apply empirical methods from other disciplines,
- replication studies, and
- studies with negative findings.
Open Science Policy
Openness in science is key to fostering progress via transparency, reproducibility and replicability. While all submissions will undergo the same review process independent of whether or not they disclose their analysis code or data, we strongly encourage authors to make data available upon submission (either privately or publicly) and especially upon acceptance (publicly). If the authors cannot disclose industrial or otherwise non-public data, they should provide an explicit (short) statement in the paper.
How to Submit
Submissions to this track are limited to 6 pages and must be submitted through EasyChair by selecting the track “Emerging Results and Vision Papers.”
All submissions must be written in English and must be submitted via EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=esem2021) in the PDF format, and they must be formatted according to the ACM proceedings template, which can be found at ACM Proceedings Template (https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template).
A structured abstract is required with the headings: Background, Aims, Method, Results, and Conclusions. Papers should contain an explicit description of the empirical strategy used or investigated. The submission must also comply with the ACM plagiarism policy and procedures (http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism_policy). In particular, it must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review elsewhere while under review for ESEM. The submission must also comply with the IEEE Policy on Authorship (http://ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/publish-with-ieee/publishing-ethics/).
ESEM 2021 will employ a double-blind review process (except for Journal-First papers and Industry Talks). Thus, regular submissions may not reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-blind review process. In particular, the authors’ names must be omitted from the submission and references to their prior work should be in the third person. Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-blind review process can be found on the conference website.
All submissions will be peer-reviewed by at least three experts from the international program committee of each track and will receive an additional meta-review. Any papers that are outside the scope of the symposium, exceed the maximum number of pages for the respective category, or do not follow the formatting guidelines will be desk rejected without review.
Finally, please note that each accepted contribution must have a minimum of one author registered (at the full conference rate) by the deadline for the camera-ready submission for their respective paper type. Also, each paper must be presented by one of the authors. Failure to meet these criteria will result in the paper’s removal from the proceedings.