Industry TrackICSME 2026

Call for Papers

Goals and Scope

The ICSME industry track brings together participants from academia and industry in a venue that highlights practical, real-world insights into 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. Practitioners’ experiences provide crucial input to guide future research directions and enable the community to learn from successes and failures.

The ICSME Industry Track will, in addition to short and full papers, also include talk proposals from Industry. The speaker’s profile is also included in the evaluation of the talk proposals, providing an opportunity for speakers to present and receive feedback without submitting a paper for review. If accepted, they are invited to give a talk at the conference.

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

Submission Types

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 be technically and empirically sound. Other aspects that should also be included, where appropriate, are 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.

Short papers (3 to 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.

Talk proposals (approx. 300 words)

Talk proposals outline the content of a 20-30-minute industry talk during the ICSME conference. The scope of 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, a short abstract, and a link to a short video (~3-5 min) about what you are going to talk about. Authors of accepted talk proposals are expected to give an in-person presentation at the ICSME conference in Benevento, Italy. The final presentation time will depend on the number of accepted submissions. The presenter must register for the conference by the early registration deadline. Otherwise, the presentation will be withdrawn from the program.

Submission

Please use the following links when submitting your contribution - and CLEARLY indicate the type of paper you submit (Short, Long, or Talk)

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icsme2026 (please select the industry track)

All short and full papers must be submitted as PDF files by the deadline via the ICSME 2026 EasyChair link. Submitted short and full papers must comply with the IEEE plagiarism policy and procedures. Papers submitted to ICSME 2026 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere while under consideration for ICSME 2026. Submitting the same paper to different tracks of ICSME 2026 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.

All submissions using AI to generate content or complete sentences should explicitly say so and reference/cite the used service. For grammar and text corrections, including spelling, you do not need to reference/cite the tools used.

Unlike the research track, in the ICSME 2026 Industry Track, the author’s name and affiliations will be known to reviewers. This means that author names and affiliations should appear on the paper, and references to authors’ own related work should be made explicit and made available to the program committee, except for Conflicts of Interest.

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.

Talks should also be submitted as a PDF (even if the original is in PowerPoint, plain text, or a similar format).

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

Publication and Presentation

Accepted talk proposals are allowed a one-pager summary of the talk, which will appear in the proceedings. This summary, however, is optional. If you want to appear in the proceedings, you should submit it following the same submission format, timeline, and rules as for the short papers.

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.

Evaluation

Full and short paper submissions will be reviewed by members of the ICSME 2026 Industry Track Program Committee according to 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.

The following evaluation criteria will be considered for a Talk:

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

Use of AI and LLMs

Authors should adhere to the guidelines for AI-generated content published by IEEE. IEEE requires that all content (including, but not limited to, figures, text, images, tables, and code) generated by AI be disclosed. The AI system should be identified, and specific sections of the article that utilize AI-generated content should be noted and accompanied by a brief explanation regarding the level of AI system involvement in producing the content. Read more at the link above. The paper chairs will investigate cases brought to their attention.

Important Dates

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

• Paper abstract submission deadline: May 8, 2026
• Paper submission deadline: May 15, 2026
• Talk proposal submission deadline: May 29, 2026
• Notifications for papers and talks proposals: June 28, 2026
• Camera-ready deadline for papers and one-pager talks: TBD