Technical PapersESEM 2021

The ESEM Technical Papers track features submissions that describe original, unpublished work in software engineering and software measurement, with a strong empirical foundation. Papers in this track should communicate fully developed research and related results. Strong emphasis should be given to the methodological aspects of the research and the discussion on the validity of results.

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.

ACM SIGSOFT Empirical Standards

Recently an ACM SIGSOFT Paper and Peer Review Quality Initiative has generated a proposal of empirical standards for common research methods in software engineering. Many researchers of the ESEM community have been actively involved in the initiative. Authors can consult them at the following link:

https://web.cs.dal.ca/SIGSOFT-Empirical-Standards/

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.

Accepted Papers

How to Submit

Submissions in this track are limited to 10 pages excluding references and 12 pages with references. Papers must be submitted via EasyChair by selecting the track “Technical 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 sigconf 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. ​