Industry TrackICSME 2024

Call for Papers

The ICSME industry track brings together participants from academia and industry in a venue that highlights practical and real-world insights on software maintenance and evolution. This track aims to foster mutually-beneficial links between those engaged in scientific research and practitioners working to improve software maintenance and evolution practices. Experiences from practitioners provide crucial input to guide future research directions and allow the community to learn from successes and failures.

NEW! This year, besides short and full papers, the ICSME Industry Track will host industry presentations. This means that practitioners or practice-oriented academic researchers can submit talk proposals, without the need to submit a paper for review. If accepted, they are invited to give a talk as part of the program of the conference.

Please note that the ICSME Industry Track track DOES NOT require anonymized submissions. For industry papers, it is often important that authors and organizations involved are visible to the reviewers in order for them to fully understand the industrial relevance and context.

Submissions

We seek the following three submission types, all of which must be written exclusively in English.

Full papers (10 pages plus 2 pages for references)

Full papers address industrially-relevant software maintenance and evolution problems through systematic investigations. Each paper should describe a problem of practical importance, explain how the problem was investigated and in what context, and present evidence for the paper’s conclusions. The submission should have technical and empirical soundness. Other aspects that should also be included where appropriate include: discussing why the resolution of the problem is innovative, (cost-)effective, or efficient; providing a concise explanation of the approach, techniques, and methodologies employed; and explaining the insights or best practices that emerged, tools developed, and/or software processes involved. Please use the following link to submit your paper: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=icsme2024

Short papers (5 pages plus 1 page for references)

Short papers outline new and unsolved research challenges derived from software maintenance and evolution issues or phenomena observed in practice. Such papers can also present success or failure stories and lessons learned by applying state-of-the-art methods, techniques, and tools to industrial software evolution and maintenance problems. If you have applied a method, technique, or tool that was previously presented at ICSME or another software engineering conference in an industrial context, we greatly encourage you to submit a paper outlining your experiences. We particularly encourage short papers that might get extended into further work, once their novelty has been acknowledged. Please use the following link to submit your paper: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=icsme2024

NEW! Talk proposals (approx. 300 words)

Talk proposals outline the content of a 20-30-minute industry talk during the ICSME conference. The scope for such talks is similar to that of short papers. They do not require an accepted research paper but an accepted talk proposal. If you are interested in giving an industry talk at ICSME, you just need to submit a title and a short abstract via an online form. Authors of accepted talk proposals are expected to give an in-person presentation at the ICSME conference in Flagstaff, Arizona, USA. The final presentation time will depend on the number of accepted submissions. The presenter needs to register for the conference by the early registration date. Otherwise, the presentation will be withdrawn from the program. Please use the following form to submit your talk proposal: https://forms.gle/dPTGbBo1vL6rgrEt9

Publication and Presentation

Accepted talk proposals will not appear in the proceedings.

Accepted short and full papers will be published in the conference proceedings and submitted for inclusion in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. All authors of all accepted papers will be asked to complete an electronic IEEE Copyright form and will receive further instructions for preparing their camera-ready versions. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference and present the paper at the conference. Failure of at least one author to register by the early registration date will result in the paper being withdrawn from the conference proceedings. IEEE reserves the right to exclude a paper from distribution after the conference (e.g., by not placing it in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library) if the paper is not presented at the conference. Presentation details will follow notifications of acceptance.

Submission Format

Talk proposals can be submitted via this form: https://forms.gle/dPTGbBo1vL6rgrEt9

All short and full papers must be submitted as PDF files by the deadline via the ICSME 2024 EasyChair link. Submitted short and full papers must comply with IEEE plagiarism policy and procedures. Papers submitted to ICSME 2024 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review, or submitted for review elsewhere while under consideration for ICSME 2024. Submitting the same paper to different tracks of ICSME 2024 is also not allowed. By submitting to this track, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the IEEE. All authors, reviewers, and organizers are expected to uphold the IEEE Code of Conduct.

Different from the research track, the ICSME 2024 Industry Track will use a single anonymous reviewing process for short and full papers. This means that author names and affiliations should appear on the paper and references to authors’ own related work should be made explicit.

Papers must strictly adhere to the two-column IEEE conference proceedings format. Please use the templates available here:

• LaTeX users should use the following configuration: \documentclass[conference]{IEEEtran}
• Microsoft Word users should use the US Letter format template.

Full papers must not exceed 10 pages (including figures and appendices) plus up to 2 pages that contain ONLY references. Short papers must not exceed 5 pages (including figures and appendices) plus up to 1 page that contains ONLY references.

Evaluation

The track chair will evaluate the relevance of talk proposals in a short video call with the presenters. The following evaluation criteria will be considered:

• The relevance of the topic to the conference.
• The speaker’s expertise on the topic.
• The potential for the presentation to stimulate discussion and debate and/or to generate new and innovative ideas.

Full and short paper submissions will be reviewed by members of the ICSME Industry Track Program Committee along the criteria outlined in the description of the corresponding submission type. We will particularly focus on the paper’s relevance to industrial practice, the significance of its contribution, and the quality of its presentation.

Important Dates

• Paper abstract submission deadline: June 20, 2024
• Paper submission deadline: June 26, 2024
• Talk proposal submission deadline: July 18, 2024
• Talk presenter interviews (short video call): until July 31, 2024
• Notifications for papers and talks proposals: August 1, 2024
• Camera-ready deadline for papers: August 20, 2024

Acknowledgments

This call for papers is partially based on the ICSME 2023 Industry Track, ICSE 2024 SEIP, and Tech Debt 2024 Industry Track call for papers.