Software Engineering EducationFSE 2026

Call for Papers

Being a software engineer is about more than just writing code.. Becoming a software engineer requires the acquisition of a balanced set of soft and technical skills. This special skill set enables software engineers to solve real-world problems. While working in teams, they are capable of developing complex software systems and evolving them gracefully. Their focus is on quality and catering to users’ needs. There are many paths that could be taken and combined to acquire the required skill set: from formal education to on-the-job training, online and offline, from coding clubs to boot camps, by watching online videos and participating in online programming contests. How do we best support our students in their journey to become software engineers?

The FSE 2026 Software Engineering Education Track (SEET) provides a venue for sharing of research and innovation in software engineering education. Submissions are expected to have a strong focus on the learning and teaching of software engineering, as a topic of courses and degree programs in higher education, as well as continuing education and on-the-job training. The work should be original, demonstrating novelty either in empirical insights or educational approach.

Topics of Interest

To be relevant to the conference, a paper must be original, with the innovation or research findings focussing on software engineering education. More specifically, topics of interest are related, but are not limited to:

Competences and Skills in Software Engineering Education

• Identifying current and emerging competence needs for software engineering graduates
• Enhancing soft skills of software engineering students
• New and obsolete software engineering skills in the age of AI

Beyond the Traditional Classroom

• Innovative learning and teaching approaches for software engineering
• Project-based and problem-based learning in software engineering education
• Work-integrated learning in software engineering education
• Continuing education and on the job-training for software engineers

Beyond Just Technology

• Sustainability and ethics in software engineering education
• Academic integrity in software engineering education
• Addressing student well-being, belonging and equity

Supporting Learning and Teaching

• Tools and platforms for software engineering education
• Usage of AI to support learning and assessment
• Empirical studies of learning effectiveness and student satisfaction
• Curriculum change and development in software engineering education
• Assessment and evaluation in software engineering education

Submission Categories

Research Paper (max 10 pages, plus up to 2 pages for references) A research paper must address a topic related to software engineering and education using appropriate research techniques and proper scholarly writing. Negative and mixed findings are welcome. Before submission, please review the ACM APC fees section below.

Experience Report (max 10 pages, plus up to 2 pages for references) An experience report provides anecdotal evidence by describing an experience related to software engineering education and training (typically a course, a teaching or training technique or strategy, or an assessment method) and interprets the experience in terms of actionable advice and lessons learned, but does not need to evaluate it or use rigorous research methods to support its claims. Negative and mixed findings are welcome, provided they can support advice or lessons learned. Before submission, please review the ACM APC fees section below.

Extended Abstract: Idea Paper (max 5 pages including references) An idea paper must present a new software engineering education and training idea with a proposed formal evaluation strategy, possibly with some preliminary or informal results. The title of the paper should include “extended abstract”, else Article Processing Charges (APC) fees will apply.

Extended Abstract: Tool Paper (max 5 pages including references) A tool paper describes a tool or technology that supports software engineering education and training. Papers in this category should discuss the impact of the tool on the learning process. A tool paper can optionally be accompanied by a short video (not exceeding five minutes) demonstrating the tool’s main functionality (if you use this option, please provide the link at the end of the abstract). Tools must be available online so they can be evaluated (also possible on a trial basis) and be mature enough. The title of the paper should include “extended abstract”, else Article Processing Charges (APC) fees will apply.

Extended Abstract: Replication Paper (max 5 pages including references) A replication paper describes the repetition of an existing and already published pedagogical intervention (e.g. course, approach, study) in new contexts. The goal is to determine whether the basic findings related to the original pedagogical intervention can be applied to other circumstances. For a replication paper, the authors should not be replicating their own previous work. The paper should include a statement confirm this. The title of the paper should include “extended abstract”, else Article Processing Charges (APC) fees will apply.

Evaluation Criteria

Submissions will be evaluated based on their category:

• Research Papers will be evaluated against these criteria: Relevance, Significance, Soundness, Verifiability, Presentation
• Experience Reports will be evaluated against these criteria: Relevance, Significance, Actionability, Lessons, Presentation
• Idea Papers will be evaluated against these criteria: Relevance, Significance, Soundness, Presentation
• Tool Papers will be evaluated against these criteria: Relevance, Significance, Presentation
• Replication Papers will be evaluated against these criteria: Relevance, Significance, Soundness, Presentation

The evaluation criteria for FSE 2026 Software Engineering Education Track papers are defined as follows:

• Relevance: The extent to which the paper is relevant to software engineering education and training
• Significance: The extent to which the paper is well-motivated and its contributions are original and important, with respect to the existing literature on software engineering education and training.
• Soundness: The extent to which the paper’s contributions are supported by rigorous application of appropriate research methods and whether the paper discusses meaningfully the research methods’ limitations and threats to the validity of the findings.
• Verifiability: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to support independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions. This includes public availability of research data. In case where this is not possible, an explicit statement why such data cannot be made publicly available is mandatory.
• Actionability: The extent to which the paper provides actionable advice with clear take-away messages.
• Lessons: The extent to which the paper meaningfully discusses lessons learned in terms of what went right, what went wrong, and what could be improved if the experience is repeated.
• Presentation: The extent to which the paper’s organization and quality of writing meets the standard: the paper is well-structured, employs clear and correct scholarly language, avoids ambiguity, includes clearly readable figures and tables, and is formatted according to the template specifications.

How to Submit

Formatting

All submissions must be in English and in PDF format. Papers must not exceed the page limits that are listed for each call for papers. The ACM styles have changed recently, and all authors should use the official “ACM Primary Article Template”, as can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page. For Microsoft Word users, please still use the “Interim Template” and not the New Workflow for ACM Publications. This should result in a two-columns format. For LaTeX users, please refer to the sample-sigconf.tex example file in the template available on the ACM Proceedings Template page. To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document:

\documentclass[sigconf,screen,review,anonymous]{acmart}

Each submission requires using the following booktitle:

\acmBooktitle{Companion Proceedings of the 34th ACM Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE ’26), July 5 - 9, 2026 Montreal, Canada}

Double anonymity

In order to ensure the fairness of the reviewing process, the FSE Software Engineering Education Track will continue to employ a double-anonymous review process where external reviewers do not know the identity of authors, and authors do not know the identity of external reviewers. The papers submitted must not reveal the authors’ identities in any way:

• Authors should leave out author names and affiliations from the body of their submission.
• Authors should ensure that any citation to related work by themselves is written in third person, that is, “the prior work of XYZ” as opposed to “our prior work”.
• Authors should not include URLs to author-revealing sites (tools, datasets). Authors are still encouraged to submit replication packages, see the FSE Open Science Policy for details.
• Authors should anonymize author-revealing company names but instead provide general characteristics of the organisations involved needed to understand the context of the paper.
• Authors should ensure that paper acknowledgements do not reveal the origin of their work.
• Anonymity requirements also apply to additional materials (e.g., replication packages) accompanying the submission.

The double-anonymous process used this year is “heavy”, i.e., the paper anonymity will be maintained during all reviewing and discussion periods. In case of major revision, authors must therefore maintain anonymity in their response letter and must provide no additional information that could be author-revealing.

To facilitate double-anonymous reviewing, we recommend the authors to postpone publishing their submitted work on arXiv or similar sites until after the notification. If the authors have uploaded to arXiv or similar, they should avoid specifying that the manuscript was submitted to FSE 2026.

Policies

By submitting to the FSE Software Engineering Education Track 2026, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism. In particular, papers submitted to the FSE Software Engineering Education Track 2026 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for FSE Software Engineering Education Track 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 to detect violations of these policies.

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. 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.

Open Science Policy

The SEET track of FSE 2026 aims to follow the Open Science policy of the main track of FSE. In summary, the steering principle is that research results should be made accessible to the public and empirical studies should be reproducible whenever possible. In particular, we actively support the adoption of open data and open source principles and encourage all contributing authors to disclose (anonymized and curated) data to increase reproducibility and replicability. Upon submission to the research track, authors are asked to make a replication package available to the program committee (via upload of supplemental material or a link to a private or public repository) or to comment on why this is not possible or desirable. Furthermore, authors are asked to indicate whether they intend to make their data publicly available upon acceptance.

We ask authors to provide a supporting statement on the availability of a replication package (or lack thereof) in their submitted papers in a section named Data Availability after the Conclusion section. This statement will not count towards the page limit for the submission. Be careful that such statements continue to maintain author anonymity.

Authors can also provide anonymized links to anonymized data and repositories in that section or can upload anonymized data using the supplementary material upload option during submission process via the HotCRP submission site (https://fse2026-seet.hotcrp.com). Authors who cannot disclose data should provide a short statement explaining the reasons why they cannot share the data in the Data Availability section of their paper, after the Conclusion section.

Authors are asked to carefully review any supplementary material to ensure it conforms to the double-anonymous policy. For example, code and data repositories may be exported to remove version control history, scrubbed of names in comments and metadata, and anonymously uploaded to a sharing site to support review. Below are some resources that can be helpful:

• A step-by-step approach to disclosing artifacts for (doubly-anonymous) peer review and make it open data upon acceptance is available online
• A step-by-step approach to automatically archive a GitHub repository to Zenodo.org is available at https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/
• A step-by-step approach to automatically archive a GitHub repository to figshare.com is available at https://knowledge.figshare.com/articles/item/how-to-connect-figshare-with-your-github-account
• A proposal for artifact evaluation by SIGSOFT is available at https://github.com/acmsigsoft/artifact-evaluation
• A proposal for open science in software engineering, including explanations for structuring an open artifact, is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.06499

Important Dates

• Submission deadline - January 22, 2026 (Thursday)
• Author notification - March 17, 2026
• Camera ready - April 2, 2026 (the same as the main track)

Submission

Submissions to the FSE SEET 2026 Track that meet the above requirements can be made via the submission site (https://fse2026-seet.hotcrp.com) by the submission deadline. Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk rejected without further review.

We encourage the authors to upload their paper info early (and can submit the PDF later) to properly enter conflicts for double-anonymous reviewing. Authors are encouraged to try out the experimental SIGSOFT Submission Checker https://github.com/acmsigsoft/submission-checker to detect violations to the formatting and double anonymous guidelines. (Mind that the tool is based on heuristics. Therefore it may miss violations, and it can raise false alarms. The requirements listed in this call for papers take precedence over the results of the tool when deciding whether a paper meets the submission guidelines.)

Upon Acceptance

Accepted papers will be published in the Companion Proceedings of FSE and submitted for inclusion in the ACM Digital Library. All authors of accepted papers will be required to complete the electronic ACM Copyright/Publishing Agreement and will receive detailed instructions for preparing the camera-ready versions. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference and present the paper in person at the conference.

ACM Article Processing Charges (APC)

For FSE 2026, ACM will fully transition to Open Access. All ACM publications, including those from ACM-sponsored conferences, will be 100% Open Access. Authors will have two primary options for publishing Open Access articles with ACM: the ACM Open institutional model or by paying Article Processing Charges (APCs). With over 1,800 institutions already part of ACM Open, the majority of ACM-sponsored conference papers will not require APCs from authors or conferences (currently, around 70-75%).

Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to pay an APC to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a financial or discretionary waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the APC Waivers and Discounts Policy. Keep in mind that waivers are rare and are granted based on specific criteria set by ACM.

Understanding that this change could present financial challenges, ACM has approved a temporary subsidy for FSE 2026 to ease the transition and allow more time for institutions to join ACM Open. The subsidy will offer:

• $250 APC for ACM/SIG members
• $350 for non-members

This represents a 65% discount, funded directly by ACM. Authors are encouraged to help advocate for their institutions to join ACM Open during this transition period.

• Types of contributions (position papers, research papers, short papers etc. + MANDATORY “extended abstracts”) and their estimated number and page limits. NOTE: Workshops must include an option for submission of “extended abstracts” (limited to five pages or less) and make it explicit that those are free of APC charges. However, for them to be free, the “extended abstract” term should be explicit in the call (and papers should be marked as such by the proceedings chairs). Please note that “short papers” are charged, but “extended abstracts” are not (see https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen/article-types).

Contacts

For more information, please contact the FSE 2026 Software Engineering Education Track Co-Chairs:

• Michael Hilton, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Alexander Serebrenik, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands.