Future of Software EngineeringICSE 2026

CALL FOR POSITION PAPERS

ICSE 2026 Future of Software Engineering

Toward a Healthy Software Engineering Community

Preamble: all is not rosy

Our flagship conferences and journals are thriving, with ever higher attendance and ever higher numbers of submissions and accepted papers. Generative AI is leading to all sorts of new and interesting research challenges to be tackled, on top of old research challenges that persist and remain relevant. Participation continues to expand globally. By all accounts, the software engineering community is doing great.

Or is it?

An undercurrent of grumbling and side conversations points to the fact that our community may not be doing so well and, indeed, may be under serious duress. “Software engineering research is no longer about interesting ideas, it is about getting as many papers published as possible.” “Peer review is broken.” “Students and faculty are burned out and disappear.” “Industry is the place of innovation; research has lost its place.” “More and more people are turning toward other communities because they still accept interesting ideas and give meaningful feedback.” “Too many events; it is impossible to keep up.” “Boring; formulaic in all aspects.” The list is neither small, nor inconsequential.

Premise: a need to intentionally structure our future

Whether one agrees with all, a few, or none of these comments is besides the point. Rather, the ICSE 2026 Future of Software Engineering: Toward a Healthy Software Engineering Community event is based on the observation that it is essential for any research community to have periodic conversations where it pauses and reflects about its shape and future, and that such conversations must be had – openly, inclusively, and intentionally. With the rapid rate of change and disruption in how software is being developed accelerating yet more, with the relationship between practice and research tenuous at best, and with the impact of political realities leading to major declines in research funding in many places, now is the time to have that conversation. We collectively must reflect on our history and how we have gotten to where we are, assess the present and what works and does not work, and shape our future and how we want to get there.

Goal: not just talk, but a community-driven plan

The goals for the event are twofold:

• To engage in meaningful conversation, driven by the entire community, to discuss the desired shape of the software engineering community in future: its values, discourse, publication landscape, relationship to industry, reward structures, and more.
• To identify a concrete action plan for moving the software engineering community from its current state into its newly desired state.

Data collection, discussion, and the action plan will focus on three themes:

• [Taking stock] What is working and what is not working?
• [Envisioning our future] What do we want or want more of, and what do we not want or want less of?
• [Planning for change] How do we get there?

The event will consist of three distinct components: pre-event data collection, one-day workshop immediately prior to ICSE, and a plenary debrief during ICSE 2026.

How to participate: something for everyone

There are several ways to participate:

• Provide your thoughts during the pre-event data collection phase. In October 2025, a targeted survey will be released to collect community thoughts, opinions, and ideas. In addition, a public Discord will open up to the community at large. Results from the survey will be posted on the Discord.
• Submit a 2-4 page position paper that addresses one of the themes above (taking stock, envisioning our future, planning for change). Position papers can focus on a particular topic (values, students, faculty, conferences, role of journals, healthy careers, review process, relevance to industry and practice, …), outline what a healthy research community looks like, be design fiction, and more. Position papers cannot be just observations on what is wrong or what is working well; every paper should minimally provide some glimpse of an alternative future. Position papers are due in the middle of January. Position papers may reference the data collected during pre-event data collection. Position papers will be lightly reviewed by the organizers to ensure coherence and a reasonable argument. No position paper will be rejected because of disagreement with the ideas therein; our goal is to have an exciting, diverse set of visions serve as the basis for the event. Accepted position papers will be posted on the Discord and also published as extended abstracts in the ICSE companion proceedings.
• Engage in the event itself. Authors of accepted position papers will be invited to engage in a one-day workshop, to be held immediately before ICSE, where the intended goal will be to outline a future, healthy software engineering research community.
• Attend the debrief and provide feedback. During ICSE 2026, the results from the event will be presented in a plenary session, where the goal is to receive further feedback on the identified vision for a healthy software engineering research community. This feedback will feed into a final vision report that will be posted on the Discord as well as published in ACM Software Engineering Notes. The vision, too, will be delivered to key stakeholders in the community (e.g., journal editors, conference steering committees, publishers).

Who should submit: you are not alone

The ICSE 2026 Future of Software Engineering: Toward a Healthy Software Engineering Community event particularly welcomes group submissions: submissions authored either by like-minded / similarly-situated colleagues (e.g., a group of practitioners, a group of junior professors, the editors of the major SE journals) or by colleagues who intentionally get together knowing their juxtaposing positions or views (e.g., a group may have a mix of junior and senior researchers, practitioners and students). Individual submissions are welcome, but we encourage people to team up so that the event benefits from small group reflection and pontification even before the event actually takes place. We also conjecture that working together as a group will be more fun and illuminating.

Keep in mind that the idea is to identify a healthy future by submitting papers that frame proposals to reinvent and reinvigorate the community and respect the many participants and stakeholders who participate and serve different roles in our community.

Dates: sooner than you think, but there is time for you to organize and contribute

• September 15, preliminary call for position papers
• October 15, 2025: survey released, Discord opened
• November 15, 2025: survey results made public
• November 15, 2025: main call for position papers
• January 14, 2026: position papers due
• January 18, 2026: accept/reject decisions
• January 26, 2026: camera ready position papers due
• April 14, 2026: workshop
• April TBD], 2026: plenary debrief during ICSE
• June 30, 2026: final vision report published

Submission process: not too onerous (so do contribute!)

• Submissions can be of any length, however please note that final accepted position papers will be published as extended abstracts in the ICSE 2026 companion proceedings that will be limited to 5 pages, including citations.
• 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.
• By submitting to this track, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism (https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism) and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ (https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/plagiarism/plagiarism-faq.html). In particular, position papers submitted to ICSE 2026 Future of Software Engineering track must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for ICSE 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.
• By submitting to this track, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM (https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/new-acm-policy-on-authorship), and the authorship policy of the IEEE (https://journals.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/become-an-ieee-journal-author/publishing-ethics/ethical-requirements/EthicalRequirements). -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.
• Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process if your position paper is accepted. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our 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.
• All papers must be written in English.
• All papers should be made accessible to people with disabilities. See the guidelines at SIGACCESS: https://assets21.sigaccess.org/creating_accessible_pdfs.html.

Submissions that meet the above requirements can be made via the ICSE 2026 Future of Software Engineering track submission site. Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk rejected without further review.

Organizers

• André van der Hoek, University of California, Irvine, U.S.A., andre@ics.uci.edu
• Margaret-Anne (Peggy) Storey, University of Victoria, Canada, mstorey@uvic.ca