FSE 2027
Mon 12 - Fri 16 July 2027 Shenzhen, China
FSE 2027 (series) /

Software Engineering EducationFSE 2027

Call for Papers

Software engineering education continues to evolve alongside changes in technology, industry practices, and societal needs. Recent advances in AI are further reshaping both the practice of software engineering and the ways in which software engineers are educated. AI-assisted development tools are changing what skills students need to learn, how they learn them, and how software engineering is taught and assessed. At the same time, AI is influencing students’ perceptions of computing disciplines and raising new questions about the future roles and identities of software engineers. How do we best support students in learning and preparing for a rapidly evolving computing landscape?

The FSE 2027 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 focusing on software engineering education. More specifically, topics of interest are related, but are not limited to:

Teaching and Learning in Software Engineering

  • 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
  • Tools and platforms for software engineering education
  • Empirical studies of learning effectiveness and student satisfaction

Curriculum, Assessment, and Educational Practice

  • Curriculum change and development in software engineering education
  • Assessment and evaluation in software engineering education
  • Sustainability and ethics in software engineering education
  • Student well-being, belonging, and equity in software engineering education

The Impact of AI on Software Engineering Education

  • Rethinking software engineering curricula and coursework design in the age of AI
  • Emerging, lasting, and obsolete software engineering skills and tools in the age of AI
  • Teaching AI-assisted software development and human-AI collaboration
  • The impact of generative AI on student motivation, enrollment, and career perceptions in software engineering
  • Evolving roles of educators in AI-supported learning environments
  • Academic integrity, fairness, and learning evaluation in the presence of generative AI tools

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 mature and available online, so they can be evaluated (also possible on a trial basis). 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 to 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:
Submission Category Evaluation Criteria
Research Papers Relevance; Significance; Soundness; Verifiability; Presentation
Experience Reports Relevance; Significance; Actionability; Lessons; Presentation
Idea Papers Relevance; Significance; Soundness; Presentation
Tool Papers Relevance; Significance; Presentation
Replication Papers Relevance; Significance; Soundness; Presentation

The evaluation criteria for FSE 2027 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 cases where this is not possible, an explicit statement of 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 meet 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

1. Formatting

All submissions must be in English and in PDF format. Papers must not exceed the page limits listed above. 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-column 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 35th ACM Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE ’27), July 12 - 16, 2027 Shenzhen, China}

2. Double anonymity

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 remove 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 organizations 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 authors 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 2027.

3. Submission Policies

By submitting to the FSE Software Engineering Education Track 2027, 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 2027 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 2027. 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 2027 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 SEET 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. 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 submission site. 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:

Important Dates

  • Submission deadline: January 29, 2027 (Friday)
  • Author notification: March 26, 2027 (Friday)
  • Camera-ready deadline: April 16, 2027

Submissions

The submission site will be available soon.

Contacts

For more information, please contact the FSE 2027 Software Engineering Education Track Co-Chairs:

  • Andrew Begel, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
  • Yida Tao, Southern University of Science and Technology, China

Program Committee