ICSME 2025 - Research Papers

Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Goal and Scope

The 41st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2025) is the premier forum for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and challenges in software maintenance and evolution. We invite high-quality submissions describing significant and unpublished results related to, but not limited to, any of the following software maintenance and evolution topics (in alphabetical order):

Change and defect management
Code cloning and provenance
Concept and feature location
Continuous integration/deployment
Empirical studies of software maintenance and evolution
Evolution of non-code artifacts
Evolution and maintenance of AI-based applications
Human factors and social aspects of software maintenance and evolution
Large Language Models for software evolution and maintenance tasks
Maintenance and evolution of model-based methods
Maintenance and evolution of mobile apps
Maintenance and evolution of service-oriented and cloud computing systems
Maintenance and evolution processes
Maintenance versus release process
Mining software repositories
Productivity of software engineers during maintenance and evolution
Release engineering
Reverse engineering and re-engineering
Run-time evolution and dynamic configuration
Software and system comprehension
Software migration and renovation
Software quality assessment
Software refactoring and restructuring
Software testing theory and practice
Source code analysis and manipulation
Technical Debt

ICSME welcomes innovative ideas that are timely, well-presented, and evaluated. All submissions must position themselves within the existing literature, describe the relevance of the results to specific software engineering goals, and include a clear motivation and presentation of the work. All submissions must be in English and follow the paper submission guidelines below.

All papers must be full papers.

Evaluation

Submissions that are not in compliance with the required submission format or that are out of the scope of the conference will be desk-rejected without being reviewed. All submissions that meet the submission criteria and fit the scope of the conference will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. The importance of contribution, originality, quality of presentation, soundness, evaluation (where applicable), and appropriate comparison to related work will be assessed for all submissions. Where applicable (e.g., empirical studies and other technical contributions with an evaluation), the replicability of the work will be evaluated.

Paper Submission

Please use the following link to submit to the research track: URL to submission system available soon

Submitted papers must comply with IEEE plagiarism policy and procedures. Papers submitted to ICSME 2025 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere while under consideration for ICSME 2025. Submitting the same paper to different tracks of ICSME 2025 is also not allowed. ICSME 2025 will use a double anonymous reviewing process. Submitted papers must adhere to the following rules:

Author names and affiliations must be omitted. (The track co-chairs will check compliance before reviewing begins.)
References to authors’ own related work must be in the third person. (For example, instead of “We build on our previous work…”, use “We build on the work of…”).
The title of the submission must be different from the authors’ preprints on arXiv or similar sites. Authors must not publicly use the submission title during the review period.

Please see more information regarding the double-anonymous review: https://icsme.github.io/faq_double_blind.html

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. Papers must not exceed 10 pages (including figures and appendices) plus up to 2 pages that contain ONLY references. All submissions must be in PDF and must be submitted online by the deadline via the ICSME 2025 EasyChair link. All authors, reviewers, and organizers are expected to uphold the IEEE Code of Conduct.

Papers that do not comply with the submission guidelines will be desk-rejected and not be sent to the PC for review.

Special Issue

Authors of select papers from the research track will be invited to submit extended versions of their work to a special issue of the Springer International Journal of Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE). Invited papers will be expected to comply with the standard guidelines when publishing an extended version of a paper, including the addition of about 30% new material.

Author Response Period

As in 2024, ICSME 2025 will offer an author response period. During this period, the authors will have the opportunity to inspect the reviews and answer specific questions raised by the program committee. This period is scheduled after all reviews have been completed and discussed, 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.

Early decisions

As in 2024, ICSME 2025 will make early decisions: If reviewers already decide that a paper can be accepted in its current state without requiring any further input from the authors, the authors will receive an “Accept” decision at the beginning of the author response period and will not be required to submit a response. Conversely, if the paper is perceived to be in a highly deficient state by the reviewers, leading them to conclude that the authors’ response is unlikely to alter their evaluation significantly, the authors will receive a “Reject” decision at the beginning of the author response period and will not be asked to submit a response. All other papers will receive a “Response Recommended” notification at the beginning of the author response period. However, as customary, it is still up to the authors to decide if they want to submit an author response.

This approach ensures that author responses are primarily reserved for cases with some controversy or where the reviewers have specific and pertinent inquiries to be addressed.

Publication and Presentation

Accepted 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. Also, 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.

Open Science Policy

ICSME encourages open science. Sharing of data sets, replication packages, or preprints is expected to be the default, and non-sharing needs to be justified, for example, in the case of industry data subject to confidentiality issues or legal requirements.

However, PC members are not required to run code and check details of the artifact, but are asked to comment on its inclusion (specifically whether the data/code promised in the paper is available in the artifact).

Upon submission, authors should do one of the following:

make their data available to the program committee via an online archival (see below),
include in the paper an explanation as to why this is not possible or desirable, or
indicate that they intend to make their data publicly available upon acceptance.

Note that, even if not intentional, the last option can create doubt in reviewers’ minds as to why the data is not made available for review. Accordingly, we strongly encourage following one of the first two options.

When sharing data, please use an online archival site such as zenodo.org, figshare.com, or osf.io. These sites ensure that the content is archived and they generate a DOI for the content, enabling it to be cited. To learn more about how to share data while maintaining double-anonymous, you may refer to the guidelines provided by Daniel Graziotin.

We recognize that anonymizing artifacts such as source code is more difficult than preserving anonymity in a paper. We ask authors to take a best-effort approach to not reveal their identities. We will also ask reviewers to avoid trying to identify authors by looking at commit histories and other such information that is not easily anonymized. Authors wanting to share GitHub repositories may want to look into using https://anonymous.4open.science, which is an open-source tool that helps you quickly double anonymous your repository.

ICSME supports and encourages Green Open Access (also called self-archiving). We encourage authors to self-archive a preprint of their accepted manuscript in an e-print server such as arXiv.org. Open access increases the availability of your work and increases citation impact. To learn more about open access, please read the Green Open Access FAQ by Arie van Deursen.

If possible, we recommend that you archive your paper (e.g., on arXiv or on your website) only after the ICSME reviewing process is completed, to avoid undermining the double-anonymous reviewing process.

Authors of papers accepted into ICSME 2025 will be invited to submit their artifacts to the Artifact Evaluation Track. Papers with accepted artifacts will be awarded badges and invited to present lightning talks at the ROSE (Recognising and Rewarding Open Science in Software Engineering) Festival. Please see the Call for Participation for the Artifact Evaluation Track.

For inquiries regarding Open Science and artifacts, we invite you to reach out to the ROSE Festival and artifacts chairs Cuiyun Gao and Kevin Moran.

Important Dates

All submission dates are at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth)

Abstract submission: March 6, 2025
Paper submission: March 13, 2025
Early Decisions notification: May 7, 2025
Final notification: June 5, 2025
Camera-ready submission: TBC

Track Co-Chairs

Matthias Galster, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Dan Hao, Peking University, China

Research PapersICSME 2025