Industry ChallengeICSE 2027

Call for Papers

The Industry Challenge Track is the premier venue for practitioners and researchers to present industry challenges in the software engineering domain and their associated solutions. The community is expected to discuss insights, innovations, and solutions to software engineering challenges in practice.

Given that addressing software engineering challenges in the industry relies on excellent software engineering research, the Industry Challenge Track provides a unique forum for networking, exchanging ideas, fostering innovations, and forging long-term collaborations to address such challenges from the industry. It is expected to become a prestigious forum for researchers and practitioners to meet and present industry-relevant research results in software engineering.

The Industry Challenge Track will welcome participants and speakers from both academic and industrial sectors, drawing together researchers and practitioners for discussions on research directions to address existing challenges. The track will be composed of invited talks, challenge presentations, paper (for solutions) presentations, and interactive sessions, all with a strong focus on software engineering industry challenges. Please note that the Industry Challenge Track uses a double-anonymous submission policy.

Process Overview

• Challenge Proposal Submission by Industry (by July 10th, 2026)
  Companies are invited to submit a 1-page description of real-world software engineering challenges they face. These should be concrete, non-trivial problems that could benefit from innovative academic or industrial solutions. Further details are provided below.
• Notification of List of Challenges (notification sent by July 24th, 2026) The Industry Challenge Track Co-Chairs will evaluate the submitted challenges and select those deemed most relevant, impactful, and suitable for the ICSE audience. The selected challenges will be publicly announced and shared with the broader software engineering community, inviting researchers and practitioners to address them.
• Submission of Solution Papers (by November 13th, 2026) Interested participants are encouraged to submit a Solution Paper addressing one of the selected challenges. Submissions must demonstrate technical soundness, relevance to the challenge, and potential for impact.
• Notification of Accepted Solution Papers (notification sent by December 18th, 2026) Submitted Solution Papers will be reviewed by a dedicated Program Committee (PC) that includes both academic and industry experts, including representatives from the originating companies. The committee will select the most significant and compelling solutions for presentation and recommend potential distinguished Solution Papers for an award. We encourage industry partners to offer a prize (USD $1000-$5000) for distinguished solution papers that will be awarded during the ICSE 2027 main conference.
• Camera-ready deadlines (by Jan 29th, 2027)
• Presentation of Challenges and Solutions (during the ICSE 2027 main conference)
  At ICSE 2027, each selected company will present its challenge in a dedicated session open to all attendees. This will be followed by presentations of the corresponding selected Solution Papers, providing a dynamic forum for dialogue, feedback, and collaboration between industry and academia.

Submission of Challenge Papers

Challenge papers are a 1-pager description of a practical, concrete, and non-trivial software engineering challenge. Authors are required to specify their challenges with a concise title, provide the context and background of their challenges, identify key technical challenges, and outline the expected technical requirements for solving the corresponding challenges. Submissions must be anonymous. The identity of the challenge proponents will not be revealed after acceptance. Please send your challenge paper by email to the Industry Challenge Track co-chairs, Yiling Lou (yilingl@illinois.edu), Gustavo Soares (gustavo.soares@microsoft.com) and Yijun Yu (yijun.yu@huawei.com).

Submission of Solution Papers

Solution papers must be submitted electronically through the ICSE 2027 Industry Challenge HotCRP submission site: https://icse2027-industry-challenge.hotcrp.com/ All submissions must be in English.

Authors are required to specify the title and the abstract of their papers, relevant research areas, the selected challenge, and their conflicts of interest (if any). This information will be used to select qualified reviewers for each submission.

All submissions must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the 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). Note that IEEE format is being used this year, whereas last year it was ACM format.

Submissions must not exceed 10 pages (5 to 10 pages are permitted, one additional page for the camera-ready version) for the main text, including all figures, tables, and appendices. Up to two additional pages containing ONLY references are permitted. All submissions must be anonymous and provide the requirements specified by the relevant challenge. Submissions that do not adhere to these limits or that violate the formatting guidelines will be desk-rejected without review.

The authors are strongly encouraged to use the HotCRP format checker on their submissions. Note that the format checker is not perfect. In particular, it can complain about small fonts in figures, footnotes, or references. As long as the main text follows the requested format and the figures are readable, the paper will not be rejected for format violations. If you have any concerns, please contact the program chairs.

Conference Attendance Expectation

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for ICSE 2027 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.

Key dates:

• Submission of Industry Challenges: by July 10th, 2026, AoE
• Challenges Notification: by July 24th, 2026, AoE
• Submission of Solution Papers: by November 13th, 2026, AoE
• Notification of Accepted Solution papers: December 18th, 2026, AoE
• Camera-ready deadlines: Jan 29th, 2027