Research TrackICPC 2026

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

The 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) is the premier venue for work in the area of software program comprehension. It encompasses human activities for comprehending the software as well as methodologies and technologies for supporting such comprehension.

The research track provides a quality forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to present and discuss new results in program comprehension. Topics of interest for all tracks include, but are not limited to:

• Empirical evaluations of program comprehension tools, techniques, and approaches;
• Human aspects in program comprehension, including collaborative software engineering practices, gender considerations, information processing strategies, the role of emotions, emotional awareness, and more;
• Cognitive theories for program comprehension are accompanied by different empirical strategies, including experiments, surveys, and case studies;
• Comprehension challenges and opportunities in the era of large language models (LLMs) and AI-assisted programming, including (but not limited to) understanding LLM-generated code, hybrid human-AI codebases, and the impact of AI tools on traditional program comprehension processes and cognitive load;
• Topics at the intersection between program comprehension and programming education;
• Individual, collaborative, distributed, and global program comprehension;
• Novel visualization or summarization techniques and interfaces to support program comprehension, including searching, browsing, and analyzing;
• Comprehension of specific types of software systems, such as open/closed source, mobile applications, spreadsheets, web-based systems, legacy systems, product lines, libraries, multi-threaded applications, and systems of systems;
• Comprehension in the context of diverse software process models and specific lifecycle activities, such as: maintenance, evolution, re-engineering, migration, security, auditing, and testing;
• Comprehension of software artifacts ranging from requirements documents to test cases and crash logs; from API documentation to models, meta-models and model transformation; and from Stack Overflow questions & answers to GitHub code review messages or video tutorials - all software artifacts and formal or informal documentation that software developers encounter when creating or evolving software;
• Comprehension and legal issues, such as due diligence, intellectual property and licensing, reverse engineering, and litigation; Issues and case studies in the transfer of program comprehension technology to industry.
• Automated tool support for program comprehension.

Awards

A subset of the Research Track papers accepted for presentation at ICPC 2026 will be invited to be revised and extended for consideration in a thematic special issue of the Springer Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE). The best papers of the research track will be awarded with an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICPC. In addition, ICPC 2026 will feature ICPC Honorable Mentions, special awards that will be assigned, on the basis of the program committee reports, to the papers that have applied extremely novel and/or outstanding research methods to the problem of interest.

Format and Submission

All submissions must be in PDF format and conform, at time of submission, to the official ACM Primary Article Template, which can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page. LaTeX users should use the sigconf option, as well as the review (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers) and anonymous (omitting author names) options. To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document:

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

• All submissions must not exceed 10 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, appendices, etc. Two more pages containing only references are permitted. All submissions must be in PDF. Accepted papers will be allowed one extra page for the main text of the camera-ready version.
• Submissions must strictly conform to the ACM conference proceedings formatting instructions specified above. Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in desk rejection without further review.
• By submitting to the ICPC Research Track, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. In particular, papers submitted to ICPC 2026 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for ICPC 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 or IEEE, to detect violations of these policies.
• If the research involves human participants/subjects, the authors must adhere to the ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Upon submitting, authors will declare their compliance with such a policy. 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.
• Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM and IEEE have been involved in ORCID and may collect ORCID IDs from all published authors. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.
• The ICPC 2026 Research Track will employ a double-anonymous review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-anonymous review process. In particular:
  • Authors’ names must be omitted from the submission.
  • All references to the author’s prior work should be in the third person.
  • While authors have the right to upload preprints on ArXiV or similar sites, they must avoid specifying that the manuscript was submitted to ICPC 2026.
  • During review, authors should not publicly use the submission title. They should thus use a different paper title for any pre-print in arxiv or similar websites.
• Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-anonymous review process can be found on the Q&A page from ICSE.
• By submitting to the ICPC Research Track, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the IEEE, submission policy of the IEEE, and the authorship policy of the ACM (and associated FAQ). This includes following these points related to the use of Generative AI:
  • “Generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT, may not be listed as authors of an ACM published Work. The use of generative AI tools and technologies to create content is permitted but must be fully disclosed in the Work. For example, the authors could include the following statement in the Acknowledgements section of the Work: ChatGPT was utilized to generate sections of this Work, including text, tables, graphs, code, data, citations, etc.). If you are uncertain ­about the need to disclose the use of a particular tool, err on the side of caution, and include a disclosure in the acknowledgements section of the Work.” - ACM
  • “The use of artificial intelligence (AI)–generated text in an article shall be disclosed in the acknowledgements section of any paper submitted to an IEEE Conference or Periodical. The sections of the paper that use AI-generated text shall have a citation to the AI system used to generate the text.” - IEEE
  • “If you are using generative AI software tools to edit and improve the quality of your existing text in much the same way you would use a typing assistant like Grammarly to improve spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement or to use a basic word processing system to correct spelling or grammar, it is not necessary to disclose such usage of these tools in your Work.” - ACM

Submissions to the Technical Track that meet the above requirements can be made via the Research Track submission site by the submission deadline. Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk-rejected without further review.

Submission site: https://icpc2026-technical.hotcrp.com/

We encourage the authors to upload their paper info early (and can submit the PDF later) to properly enter conflicts for double-anonymous reviewing. It is the sole responsibility of the authors to ensure that the formatting guidelines, double anonymous guidelines, and any other submission guidelines are met at the time of paper submission.

Exclusions

Submissions from the ICPC 2026 General Chair, Program Chairs, their current students, and current postdocs are not allowed in any ICPC 2026 track.

Open Science Policy

The research track of ICPC 2026 is striving to abide by Open Science policies. In summary, the steering principle is that all research results should be accessible to the public, if possible, and that empirical studies should be reproducible. 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. Note that sharing research data is not mandatory for submission or acceptance. However, sharing is expected to be the default, and non-sharing needs to be justified.

Upon submission to the research track, authors are asked: - to make their data available to the program committee (via upload of supplemental material or a link to an anonymous repository) – and provide instructions on how to access this data in the paper; or - to include in the paper an explanation as to why this is not possible or desirable; and - to indicate if they intend to make their data publicly available upon acceptance.

Supplementary material can be uploaded via the ICPC submission site or anonymously linked from the paper submission. Authors are asked to carefully review any supplementary material to ensure it conforms to the double-anonymous policy (described above). 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. One resource that may help accomplish this task is this guide on how to disclose data for double-blind review.

Review and Evaluation Criteria

Research papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee. The reviewers will remain anonymous and signing of reviews will not be permitted in the review.

Research papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee. The reviewers will remain anonymous, and signing of reviews will not be permitted in the review.

Submissions will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

• Soundness: The extent to which the paper’s contributions are supported by rigorous application of appropriate research methods;
• Significance: The extent to which the paper’s contributions impact program comprehension, and if needed, under which assumptions;
• Novelty: The extent to which the contributions are sufficiently original with respect to the state of the art and clearly explained and contrasted against it;
• Verifiability: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to support independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions;
• Presentation: The extent to which the paper’s quality of writing meets the standards of ICPC, including clear descriptions and explanations, appropriate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and adherence to the formatting instructions provided above.

Reviewers will carefully consider all of these criteria during the review process, and authors should take great care in clearly addressing them all. The paper should clearly explain the claimed contributions, and how they are sound, significant, novel, and verifiable, as described above.

Withdrawing a Paper

Authors can withdraw their paper at any moment until the final decision has been made, through the paper submission system. Resubmitting the paper to another venue before the final decision has been made without withdrawing from ICPC 2026 first is considered a violation of the concurrent submission policy and will lead to automatic rejection from ICPC 2026 as well as any other venue adhering to this policy.

Publication and Presentation

Upon notification of acceptance, all authors of accepted papers will receive further instructions for preparing the camera-ready versions of their submissions. If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for ICPC 2026, attend the conference, and present the paper in person. All accepted papers will be published in the conference electronic proceedings. The presentation is expected to be delivered in person, unless this is impossible due to travel limitations (related to, e.g., health, visa, or COVID-19 prevention). Details about the presentations will follow the notifications. The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM or IEEE Digital Libraries. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICPC 2026. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. Purchases of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.