ICSE 2020 Software Engineering Education and Training

The Software Engineering Education and Training (SEET) track is premier forum for research and experience reports on challenges, innovations, and best practices in software engineering and training. We invite high quality submissions describing original and unpublished results and experiences.

Call for Papers

Software engineering education is a lifelong activity. Globally, K-12 education has begun to incorporate computing into school, including many foundational concepts from software engineering. Demand for computer and information science graduates is at an all-time high. Coding bootcamps are nearly graduating more software developers than all CS departments combined. And professional software developers’ daily work, more than ever, is defined by learning new languages, new APIs, and new platforms, and discarding old knowledge and skills.

However, many open questions remain about how to support this learning. What skills does software engineering require? How can teachers effectively and equitably teach these skills? How can online materials and communities teach these skills? What is the role of educational technology in supporting this learning and teaching? And how do we integrate this learning into existing and future organizations, such as schools and companies?

The Software Engineering Education and Training track seeks research papers and experience reports on all of these aspects of learning and teaching software engineering. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Foundational research about software engineering skills
• Novel methods of teaching software engineering skills
• Novel methods of evaluating, assessing, and measuring software engineering skills
• Evaluations of teaching and assessment methods
• Empirical studies describing software engineering education contexts
• Novel learning technologies that support software engineering education and training
• Well-substantiated arguments about what skills are most essential to learn
• Investigations into equity, diversity, and inclusion in software engineering education
• Studies of formal learning contexts such as school or trainings
• Studies of informal learning such as hackathons, learning on the job, and Stack Overflow
• The role of culture in software engineering education and training

Submission

• Research papers (5-10 pages, plus up to 2 for references). Papers in this category will be evaluated against the same four criteria as research papers in the ICSE technical track:
  • Soundness: How well the paper’s contributions are supported by rigorous application of appropriate research methods.
  • Significance: The extent to which the paper’s contributions are novel, original, and important, with respect to the existing literature on software engineering and computing education.
  • 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 includes clear descriptions and explanations, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and adherence to the formatting.
• Experience reports (up to 4 pages). Papers in this category will be held to the same presentation, verifiability, and significance criteria as research papers, but not to the soundness criterion. Typical experience reports will describe an idea or an experience, but not evaluate it, nor use research methods to support claims about it.

All SEET submissions must not exceed 10 pages, including all text, figures, tables, and appendices. Two additional pages containing only references are permitted for research papers. Additionally:

• Formatting instructions are available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for both LaTeX and Word users. LaTeX users must use the provided acmart.cls and ACM-Reference-Format.bst without modification, enable the conference format in the preamble of the document (i.e., \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}), and use the ACM reference format for the bibliography (i.e., \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}). The review option adds line numbers, thereby allowing referees to refer to specific lines in their comments.
• Submission must comply with the ACM plagiarism policy and procedures. In particular, it must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review elsewhere while under review for ICSE.
• Submissions must comply with the IEEE Policy on Authorship.

All papers will be reviewed using a double-blind review process. This means that submissions should make every effort to avoid disclosing the authors’ identity or affiliation, including anonymizing the names and affiliations in the submitted draft. A submission found to violate the double-blind review guidelines might be desk-rejected before review. For more details, please see the author tips in the ICSE 2020 double blind review process description.

Each submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. All papers 4 or fewer pages will be treated as experience reports. All other papers will be reviewed as research papers.

Accepted papers and panel summaries will be published in the ICSE-SEET 2020 Proceedings and in the ACM and IEEE digital libraries. The official publication date of the proceedings is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Important Dates

Submissions deadline: 29 October, 2019

Notification of reviewing decisions: 15 January, 2020

Camera ready due: 7 February, 2020