Ideas, Visions and ReflectionsFSE 2025

Call for Ideas, Visions and Reflections Papers

FSE 2025 Ideas, Visions and Reflections Track (FSE-IVR) seeks to disrupt the status quo in our discipline with radical, innovative, thought-provoking new ideas, and research directions, as well as lessons learned from the past.

We invite three types of papers:

1. Innovative, groundbreaking new ideas supported by promising initial results, such as:
   • Exciting new directions in early stages of research, supported by initial evidence.
   • Startling new results that come in conflict with established results or beliefs, supporting a call for fundamentally new research directions.
2. Visions of the future, such as:
   • Bold visions of new directions that may not yet be supported by solid results but rather by a strong and well-motivated scientific intuition. Examples include unusual synergies with other disciplines, or the importance of software engineering in problems whose software engineering aspects have not been studied earlier.
   • Summaries of highly innovative research ideas recently awarded as grants.
3. Reflections on the past, such as:
   • Bold revisits of current research directions that may be somehow misguided.
   • Thoughtful observations coalescing the most important ideas since the inception of the field of software engineering, where they have led us so far, where past ideas have turned out to be right or wrong.

Submissions must clearly motivate and illustrate initial evidence (type 1) or a rationale (types 2 and 3) for changing current practice and/or research in software engineering. The writing style can be narrative to the extent where this supports the motivation for an emerging research direction.

Evaluation results are not required for FSE-IVR papers. Preliminary results for submissions of the first type or a sketch of an evaluation plan for submissions of the second type, could help the reviewers understand the scope of the work better.

FSE Ideas, Visions and Reflections Track is a cultural forum for encouraging trailblazers to share their vision and new research directions that connect to other fields or to share candid, critical reflections on past and present research. FSE-IVR publications lay the foundation for strong full-paper publications later on.

Scope

FSE-IVR provides a forum for innovative, thought-provoking research in software engineering to accelerate the exposure of the community to early, yet promising and potentially inspiring research efforts. FSE-IVR papers are first-class contributions that provide novel, soundly motivated research directions, emerging results, and thoughtful reflections.

The track addresses the same technical topics of interest as those of the research paper track. However, authors are encouraged to combine these topics in new ways to establish connections to other fields outside of classical software engineering, as well as to argue for the importance of software engineering research in areas not explicitly listed.

Out of Scope

A submission should not be an FSE full research submission lacking an evaluation, or a disguised advertisement for previously published results: An FSE research track submission with slightly less evaluation or lower quality is not a good FSE-IVR paper.

Evaluation

All papers will be evaluated according to:

• Value: the problem is worth exploring
• Impact: the potential for disruption of current practice
• Originality: the novelty of the paper insight
• Scholarship: appropriate consideration of relevant literature
• Quality: overall paper quality

Innovative, groundbreaking new ideas (type 1) papers will also be evaluated according to:

• Surprise: startling and unexpected findings

Visions of the future (type 2) and Reflections on the past (type 3) papers will also be evaluated according to:

• Validity: soundness of the rationale

How to Submit

In the submission form, authors must clearly identify their paper as one of - New Ideas and Early Results - Visions (of the future) - Reflections (on the past)

A submission must conform at the time of submission to the FSE 2025 Format and Submission Guidelines, and must not exceed four pages (not including a one-page bibliography). Papers must be submitted electronically at the FSE-IVR submission site by the submission deadline.

FSE-IVR will employ the same double blind review process as the main research track. Submissions must not reveal authors’ identities; consult the main research track CfP for more details on appropriate anonymization practices.

Submissions that do not comply with the instructions and size limits may be rejected without review.

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register and present the paper at FSE 2025 in order for the paper to be published in the proceedings. One-day registrations do NOT satisfy the registration requirement. Please carefully read the complete list of FSE Submission Policies.

Important Dates

All dates are 23:59:59 AoE (UTC-12h)

• Submission deadline: January 16, 2025
• Notification to authors: March 14, 2025
• Camera-ready deadline: April 24, 2025

If you have any questions about the suitability of a paper, please contact the co-chairs, Christian Bird, Filomena Ferrucci, and Wei Le.

Submission Link
https://fse2025-ivr.hotcrp.com