Technical TrackICSE 2021

ICSE is the premier forum for presenting and discussing the most recent and significant technical research contributions in the field of Software Engineering. We invite high quality submissions of technical research papers describing original and unpublished results of software engineering research. We welcome submissions addressing topics across the full spectrum of Software Engineering.

Technical track acceptance sent out

ICSE 2021 received 615 submissions. Of these, 13 were desk rejected for double-blind or formatting violations. The remaining 602 papers went through a thorough review process, with at least three reviewers, one meta-reviewer, and an area chair per paper. Following an online discussion, the program committee decided to accept 138 papers, including 30 conditional ones. We will announce the acceptance rate after finalizing all conditional decisions.

We are extremely grateful to the PC: They wrote over 1800 reviews, 550 meta-reviews, placed over 10,000, comments, made over 3500 edits to improve your reviews – all while also teaching, advising your students, and taking care of their families during a pandemic.

Call for Papers

ICSE is the premier forum for presenting and discussing the most recent and significant technical research contributions in the field of Software Engineering. We invite high quality submissions of technical research papers describing original and unpublished results of software engineering research. We welcome submissions addressing topics across the full spectrum of Software Engineering including but not limited to:

• AI and software engineering
  • Search-based software engineering
  • Machine learning with and for SE
  • Recommender systems
  • Autonomic systems and self adaptation
  • Program synthesis
  • Program repair  
• Testing and analysis
  • Software testing
  • Program analysis
  • Validation and Verification
  • Fault localization
  • Formal methods
  • Programming languages  
• Empirical software engineering
  • Mining software repositories
  • Apps and app store Analysis
  • Software ecosystems
  • Qualitative research methods  
• Software evolution
  • Evolution and maintenance
  • Debugging
  • Program comprehension
  • API design and evolution
  • Configuration management
  • Release engineering and DevOps
  • Software reuse
  • Refactoring
  • Reverse engineering
  • Software visualization  
• Social aspects of software engineering
  • Human aspects of software engineering
  • Human-computer interaction
  • Distributed and collaborative software engineering
  • Agile methods and software processes
  • Software economics
  • Crowd-based software engineering
  • Ethics in software engineering  
• Requirements, modeling, and design
  • Requirements Engineering
  • Modeling and Model-Driven Engineering
  • Software Architecture and Design
  • Tools and Environments
  • Variability and product lines
  • Parallel, Distributed, and Concurrent Systems
  • Software services  
• Dependability
  • Software Security
  • Privacy
  • Reliability and Safety
  • Performance
  • Green and sustainable technologies
  • Embedded / cyber-physical systems
  • Mobile applications

Review Criteria

Each paper submitted to the Technical Track 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 are important with respect to open software engineering challenges
• Novelty: The extent to which the contribution is sufficiently original and is clearly explained with respect to the state-of-the-art
• 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 high standards of ICSE, including clear descriptions and explanations, adequate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and adherence to the formatting instructions provided below

Reviewers will carefully consider all of these criteria during the review process, and as a result, high-quality papers may vary considerably in their type of contribution. For example, one paper could provide an extensive replication of prior work while another could describe a highly novel approach supported by non-trivial experimentation or empirical analysis.

How to Submit

• All submissions must conform to the ICSE 2021 formatting and submission instructions and 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. The page limit is strict, and it will not be possible to purchase additional pages at any point in the process (including after the paper is accepted).
• Submissions must conform to the IEEE formatting instructions IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options).
• By submitting to the ICSE Technical 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 ICSE 2021 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for ICSE 2021. 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.
• The ICSE 2021 Technical Track will employ a double-blind review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-blind review process. In particular, the authors’ names must be omitted from the submission and references to their prior work should be in the third person. Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-blind review process can be found in the Q&A page.
• By submitting to the ICSE Technical Track, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM, and the authorship policy of the IEEE

Submissions to the Technical Track that meet the above requirements can be made via the Technical Track submission site (https://icse2021.hotcrp.com) by the submission deadline. We encourage the authors to upload their paper info early (and can submit the PDF later) to properly enter conflicts for double-blind reviewing.

Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk rejected by the Technical Track PC Chairs without further review. ICSE 2021 is conducting a pilot with a new open source tool, the SIGSOFT Submission Checker to check conformance to the formatting and double blind guidelines. You can help us by trying out the tool yourself. If you see valid warnings you’ll know how to update your paper; if you identify places for improvement of the tool, please file an issue (or offer a pull request).

Supplementary Material

Authors are requested to adhere to the ICSE 2021 Open Science policies to the best of their abilities. To that end supplementary material can be uploaded via the HotCRP site or anonymously linked from the paper submission. Although PC members are not obligated to look at this material, we strongly encourage submitters to use supplementary material to provide access to anonymized code or data, whenever possible. Please carefully review any supplementary material to ensure it conforms to the double-blind 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 be helpful in accomplishing this task is this blog post.

Upon acceptance, authors have the possibility to separately submit their supplementary material to the ICSE 2021 Artifact Evaluation track, for recognition of artifacts that are reusable, available, replicated or reproduced.

Author Response Period

ICSE 2021 will offer a three day author response period. In this period the authors will have the opportunity to inspect the reviews, and answer to specific questions raised by the program committee. This period is scheduled after all reviews have been completed, and serves to inform the subsequent decision making process. Authors will be able to see the full reviews, including the reviewer scores as part of the author response process.

Withdrawing a Paper

Authors can withdraw their paper at any moment until the final decision has been made, through the paper submission system. Resubmitting a paper to another venue before the final decision has been made without withdrawing from ICSE 2021 first is considered a violation of the concurrent submission policy, and will lead to automatic rejection from ICSE 2021 as well as any other venue adhering to this policy.

Important Dates

• Technical Track Submissions Deadline: 28 August 2020
• Technical Track Author Response Period: 18–20 November 2020
• Technical Track Acceptance Notification: 17 December 2020
• Technical Track Camera Ready: 12 February 2021

Conference Attendance Expectation

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for ICSE 2021 and present the paper. 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).

Double Blind Frequently Asked Questions

The ICSE 2021 Technical track will adopt a double-blind review process. Further advice, guidance and explanation about the double-blind review process can be found in the Q&A page. This FAQ’s is based on guidelines for double-blind reviewing from ASE 2020 and ICSE 2020*.

Accepted Papers

ABOUT PROCEEDINGS

• Your paper must be formatted according to the instructions at https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html. Validation of the paper formatting will be part of the submission process.

• The given page limits are strict. It is not possible to buy extra pages.

• The list of authors (names, emails, affiliations, order) is not allowed to be changed after notification. If a correction is needed (e.g., because the author name was misspelled), the track/event chairs need to approve the change. The authors should also notify the track/event chairs if the author list in HotCRP data about the paper is not identical to the author list in initial-submission pdf (not relevant for tracks with double-blind process).

• In the next days, you will be contacted by the publisher (IEEE CPS) with the instructions and link where to submit the camera-ready version of your paper (please do not submit it to HotCRP and wait for the instructions). As part of the process, you will also need to submit your IEEE copyright (before you complete your final paper submission). So please read the instructions carefully immediately after it arrives.

• At least one of the paper’s authors must register to the conference no later than January 31, 2021 specifying the unique Paper ID, assigned to each paper by IEEE CPS publishing vendor and sent to you when inviting you to submit the camera ready version of your paper.

ABOUT OPEN POLICIES

As you know, ICSE 2021 has embraced open science practices towards higher transparency of the scientific process and availability of research artifacts. With ICSE 2021 going virtual, more than ever we need to ensure access to such a widely distributed audience.

In case you have not done so at submission time already, we ask you to inspect the open science policies (https://conf.researchr.org/track/icse-2021/icse-2021-open-science-policies) while preparing the camera ready. In particular, make sure to:

1. Provide a supporting statement on the data/software/analysis scripts/…/artifact availability (or lack thereof, which should be accompanied by reasons for non-disclosure) in a section named Data Availability after the Conclusion section.

2. Self-archive your camera ready (NOT the typeset proof by IEEE).

The policies (https://conf.researchr.org/track/icse-2021/icse-2021-open-science-policies) contain instructions and tutorials for all the above. In case of questions, do not hesitate to contact the open science chair Daniel Graziotin (daniel.graziotin@iste.uni-stuttgart.de).

ABOUT PRESENTATION AND TIMING

• ICSE main conference will be held from Tuesday May 25 to Friday May 28, 2021.

• You presentation will be 10 minutes long. The presentation will be recorded, not live (you are required to provide a 10 minutes video presentation).

• Q&A will last for 10 minutes. Q&A will be live.

• After every session there will be breakout rooms for every paper to continue discussion with interested attendees.

• Program will have a uniform daily schedule of 12 hours (10:00-22:00 CEST) and will be mirrored in the other 12 hours. Authors are encouraged to be present in the Q&A of the live/main conference (10:00-22:00 CEST). They can be or not present in the mirrored conference (22:00-10:00 CEST) although we encourage to do so if the time is not too inconvenient for their time zone. It may be that for some regions (Japan, Australia, Hawaii) we allow authors to be present in the mirror rather than in the main conference if the time of their session is too uncomfortable. This will be further clarified to authors.

ABOUT REQUIRED INFORMATION TO UPLOAD

• You are required to provide a compulsory 10 minutes video, shown as part of the conference program. Optionally, you can provide another video of 20 minutes maximum for those people who prefer watching a video over reading a paper.

• Based on the Open Science Initiative of ICSE 2021, you are required to self-archive your camera ready. So, you will be required to provide us the link that will appear in ICSE 2021 website.

• Further instructions and details on all these matters will be specified as the process advances.