Research TrackICSE 2026

Call for Papers

The International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) is the premier forum for presenting and discussing the most recent and significant technical research contributions in the field of Software Engineering. In the research track, we invite high-quality submissions of technical research papers describing original and unpublished results of software engineering research.

ICSE 2026 will follow a dual deadline structure introduced in 2024. In other words, submissions will occur in two cycles. Please refer to the section on Dual Submission Cycles in the following for the information.

IMPORTANT #1: Starting 2026, all articles published by ACM will be made Open Access. Most authors will be covered by ACM OPEN agreements by that point and will not have to pay Article Processing Charges (APC). Check if your institution participates in ACM OPEN.

IMPORTANT #2: Submissions must follow the latest “IEEE Submission and Peer Review Policy” and “ACM Policy on Authorship” (with associated FAQ, which includes a policy regarding the use of generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT.

Research Areas

ICSE welcomes submissions addressing topics across the full spectrum of Software Engineering, being inclusive of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research. Topics of interest include the following and are grouped into the following nine research areas. Please note that these topics are by no means exhaustive.

Each submission will need to indicate one of these nine areas as the chosen area. Optionally, the authors can consider adding an additional area. A paper may be moved from the chosen area(s) to another focus area at the discretion of the program chairs. Program chairs will ultimately assign a paper to an area chair, considering the authors’ selection, the paper’s content, and other factors such as (if applicable) possible conflicts of interest.

AI for Software Engineering

• AI-enabled recommender systems for automated SE (e.g., code generation, program repair, AIOps, software composition analysis, etc.)

• Human-centered AI for SE (e.g., how software engineers can synergistically work with AI agents)

• Trustworthy AI for SE (e.g., how to provide guarantees, characterize limits, and prevent misuse of AI for SE)

• Sustainable AI for SE (e.g., how to reduce energy footprint for greener AI for SE)

• Collaborative AI for SE (e.g., how AI agents collaborate for automating SE)

• Automating SE tasks with LLM and other foundation models (e.g., large vision model)

• Efficacy measurement beyond traditional metrics (e.g., accuracy, BLEU, etc.)

• Prompt engineering for SE (e.g., novel prompt design)

• AI-assisted software design and model driven engineering (e.g., specification mining, program synthesis, software architectural design)

Analytics

• Mining software repositories, including version control systems, issue tracking systems, software ecosystems, configurations, app stores, communication platforms, and novel software engineering data sources, to generate insights through various research methods

• Software visualization

• Data-driven user experience understanding and improvement

• Data driven decision making in software engineering

• Software metrics (and measurements)

Architecture and Design

• Architecture and design measurement and assessment

• Software design methodologies, principles, and strategies

• Theory building for/of software design

• Architecture quality attributes, such as security, privacy, performance, reliability

• Modularity and reusability

• Design and architecture modeling and analysis

• Architecture recovery

• Dependency and complexity analysis

• Distributed architectures, such as microservice, SOA, cloud computing

• Patterns and anti-patterns

• Technical debt in design and architecture

• Architecture refactoring

• Adaptive architectures

• Architecture knowledge management

Dependability and Security

• Formal methods and model checking (excluding solutions focusing solely on hardware)

• Reliability, availability, and safety

• Resilience and antifragility

• Confidentiality, integrity, privacy, and fairness

• Performance

• Design for dependability and security

• Vulnerability detection to enhance software security

• Dependability and security for embedded and cyber-physical systems

Evolution

• Evolution and maintenance

• API design and evolution

• Release engineering and DevOps

• Software reuse

• Refactoring and program differencing

• Program comprehension

• Reverse engineering

• Environments and software development tools

• Traceability to understand evolution

Human and Social Aspects

• Focusing on individuals (from program comprehension, workplace stress to job satisfaction and career progression)

• Focusing on teams (e.g., collocated, distributed, global, virtual; communication and collaboration within a team), communities (e.g., open source, communities of practice) and companies (organization, economics)

• Focusing on society (e.g., sustainability; diversity and inclusion)

• Focusing on programming languages, environments, and tools supporting individuals, teams, communities, and companies.

• Focusing on software development processes

Requirements and Modeling

• Requirements engineering (incl. non-functional requirements)

• Theoretical requirement foundations

• Requirements and architecture

• Feedback, user and requirements management

• Requirements traceability and dependencies

• Modeling and model-driven engineering

• Variability and product lines

• Systems and software traceability

• Modeling languages, techniques, and tools

• Empirical studies on the application of model-based engineering

• Model-based monitoring and analysis

Software Engineering for AI

• SE for AI models

• SE for systems with AI components

• SE for AI code, libraries, and datasets

• Engineering autonomic systems and self-healing systems

• Automated repair of AI models

• Testing and verification of AI-based systems

• Validation and user-based evaluation of AI-based systems

• Requirements engineering for AI-based systems

Testing and Analysis

• Software testing

• Automated test generation techniques such as fuzzing, search-based approaches, and symbolic execution

• Testing and analysis of non-functional properties

• GUI testing

• Mobile application testing

• Program analysis

• Program synthesis (e.g., constraint based techniques)

• Program repair

• Debugging and fault localization

• Runtime analysis and/or error recovery

Scope

Since the authors will choose an area for their submission, the scope of each area becomes important. Some submissions may relate to multiple areas. In such cases, the authors should choose the area for which their paper brings the maximum new insights. Moreover, authors also have the choice of indicating an alternate area for each paper.

Similarly, for certain papers. authors may have a question whether it belongs to any area, or is simply out of scope. For such cases, we recommend the authors to judge whether their paper brings new insights for software engineering. As an example, a formal methods paper with a focus on hardware verification may be deemed out of scope for ICSE. In general, papers that only peripherally concern software engineering and do not give new insights from the software engineering perspective would be less relevant to ICSE. Our goal is, however, to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive, to enable authors to make their own decisions about relevance.

Dual Submission Cycles

ICSE 2026 will have two submission cycles as follows:

First submission cycle

• (Mandatory) Abstract: March 7, 2025

• Submission: March 14, 2025

• Author response period (3 days): May 27-29, 2025

• Notification: June 20, 2025

• Revision due: July 18, 2025

• Camera-ready (of directly accepted papers): TBA

• Final decision (of revised papers): October 17, 2025

• Camera-ready (of accepted revised papers): TBA

Second submission cycle

• (Mandatory) Abstract: July 11, 2025

• Submission: July 18, 2025

• Author response period (3 days): September 23-25, 2025

• Notification: October 17, 2025

• Revision due: November 14, 2025

• Camera-ready (of directly accepted papers): TBA

• Final decision (of revised papers): December 19, 2025

• Camera-ready (of accepted revised papers): TBA

All dates are 23:59:59 AoE (UTC-12h).

Review Criteria

Each paper submitted to the Research Track will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

i) Novelty: The novelty and innovativeness of contributed solutions, problem formulations, methodologies, theories, and/or evaluations, i.e., the extent to which the paper is sufficiently original with respect to the state-of-the-art.

ii) Rigor: The soundness, clarity, and depth of a technical or theoretical contribution, and the level of thoroughness and completeness of an evaluation.

iii) Relevance: The significance and/or potential impact of the research on the field of software engineering.

iv) Verifiability and Transparency: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to understand how an innovation works; to understand how data was obtained, analyzed, and interpreted; and how the paper supports independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions. Any artifacts attached to or linked from the paper will be checked by one reviewer.

v) Presentation: The clarity of the exposition in the paper.

Reviewers will carefully consider all of the above criteria during the review process, and authors should take great care in clearly addressing them all. The paper should clearly explain and justify the claimed contributions. Each paper will be handled by an area chair who will ensure reviewing consistency among papers submitted within that area.

The outcome of each paper will be one of the following Accept, Revision, Reject. We now elaborate on the Revision outcome in the following.

Revisions

Papers submitted can go through revisions in response to specific revision requests made by the reviewers. Authors of papers receiving a Revision decision are expected to submit the revised papers, as well as the revised papers with changes marked in a different color, such as using LaTeXdiff. The authors also need to submit an “Author Response” document capturing the authors’ response to each reviewer’s comment and how those comments were addressed in the revision. This is similar to the “Summary of Changes and Response” document that is typically submitted by authors for a journal paper’s major revision. Authors may use the revision opportunity to revise and improve the paper, but should not use this to submit a substantially different paper. The reviewers will check the revised paper against the original paper and the suggested changes. Revised papers will be examined by the same set of reviewers. An unsatisfactory revised paper will be rejected. Authors are given approximately 4 weeks to submit the revised papers. Authors are given an additional page of text in a revised paper to accommodate the required changes specified in the reviews.

Re-submissions of Rejected Papers

Authors of papers that receive a REJECT decision in the first submission cycle are strongly discouraged from re-submitting it to the second submission cycle. However, in exceptional cases where the authors feel that the reviewers misunderstood their paper, authors can re-submit their paper to the second submission cycle with a “Clarifications and Summary of Improvements” document stating how they have changed the paper. They should also include the past reviews as part of this document, for completeness. These papers will be treated as new submissions, which may or may not get the same set of reviewers at the discretion of the PC chairs. Authors who try to bypass this guideline (e.g., by changing the paper title without significantly changing paper content, or by making small changes to the paper content) will have their papers desk-rejected by the PC chairs without further consideration.

Submission Process

All submissions must be in PDF format and conform, at time of submission, to the to the ACM Proceedings Template: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. LaTeX users must use the \documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart} option.

• 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 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 2026 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.

• 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 ICSE 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 ICSE 2026.

  • All communication with the program committee must go through the program committee chairs. Do not contact individual program committee members regarding your submission.

• Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-anonymous review process can be found on the Q&A page.

• By submitting to the ICSE 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://icse2026.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.

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology and ICSE 2026, have received approval from the ICSE Steering Committee to launch are participating in the Sustainable Community Review Effort (SCRE) program, aimed at reducing community effort in reviewing journal extensions of conference papers and allowing authors to get faster and more consistent feedback. More information is available at: http://tinyurl.com/icse25-scre

Open Science Policy

The research track of ICSE 2026 is governed by the ICSE 2026 Open Science policies. The guiding principle is that all research results should be accessible to the public and, if possible, empirical studies should be reproducible. In particular, we actively support the adoption of open artifacts and open source principles. We encourage all contributing authors to disclose (anonymized and curated) data/artifacts to increase reproducibility and replicability. Note that sharing research artifacts is not mandatory for submission or acceptance. However, sharing is expected to be the default, and non-sharing needs to be justified. We recognize that reproducibility or replicability is not a goal in qualitative research and that, similar to industrial studies, qualitative studies often face challenges in sharing research data. For guidelines on how to report qualitative research to ensure the assessment of the reliability and credibility of research results, see this curated Q&A page.

Upon submission to the research track, authors are asked

• to make their artifact 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 submission an explanation as to why this is not possible or desirable; and

• to indicate in the submission why they do not intend to make their data or study materials publicly available upon acceptance, if that is the case. The default understanding is that the data and/or other artifacts will be publicly available upon acceptance of a paper.

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 ICSE 2026 first is considered a violation of the concurrent submission policy, and will lead to automatic rejection from ICSE 2026 as well as any other venue adhering to this policy. Such violations may also be reported to appropriate organizations e.g. ACM and IEEE.

Conference Attendance Expectation

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for ICSE 2026 and present the paper. We are assuming that the conference will be in-person, and if it is virtual or hybrid, virtual presentations may be possible. These matters will be discussed with the authors closer to the date of the conference.