Research PapersICSSP/ICGSE 2021

In March 2020 the whole world was brought to a halt caused by the pandemic crisis. As highlighted by the UN (United Nations), the COVID-19 pandemic is far more than a health crisis, it is affecting societies and economies at their core. Most countries are in recession and their GDP decreased up to 20% leading not only to just temporarily postponed recruitments and growth, but also to drastic job cuts. Large number of companies in different sectors have sent their employees to work from home, with the effects of the forced remote work yet to be understood. The pandemic has also created the largest disruption of education systems in history, affecting nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries and all continents. Immediate development responses in this crisis must be undertaken with an eye to the future and development trajectories in the long-term have to be considered. As a consequence, and fortunately, a rapidly growing body of research is exploring and overcoming some of the challenges imposed by this pandemic situation. In the ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 edition, we are particularly interested in how system and software processes have been adapted to face the restrictions and constraints imposed by the pandemic. To which extent do the magnitude of the research and industry response in terms of methods, processes, tools and new styles of working match the scale of this crisis? What has been proposed in order to diminish the negative impact of the lockdown on development teams in terms of productivity drop, motivation and creativity? What are the issues and challenges that still need to be solved? And finally, what kind of future shall software companies expect after the pandemic is over?

Topics of interest

Submissions must be related to software and systems processes and/or global software engineering and we are especially interested in, but not limited to, papers addressing the topics in the following list:

Methods and processes Emerging processes supporting remote work (e.g. remote pair and mob programming) Agile methods in co-located and distributed companies, projects and teams Large-scale agile Lean development DevOps Hybrid processes Open source software development Crowdsourcing AI for supporting software and systems processes Software and systems processes for developing AI-based systems Software representation and design (architectures, components and services) General software process related studies and research projects Empirical studies and experiences Human Aspects of Distributed Development Human-centered and participatory processes Diversity and inclusion Communication, coordination, and collaboration Team building Trust and social relationships Newcomers’ onboarding and socialization

Business Strategy Business models Economics Hiring in global settings Strategic issues Supplier management Evolution or transformation of organizations Business continuity Emerging Technologies for Supporting Software Process and Collaboration Collaboration tools and platforms ALM/PLM for distributed teams Infrastructure for remote work Social media support Remote working in teams Augmented, virtual, and extended reality (AR/VR/XR) Low-code development practices Quantum programming and software engineering Education and Training Educational studies Software process management (SPM) or GSE curricula Lessons learned on SPM or GSE courses

Important Dates

Abstract Submission: Jan 5, 2021
Paper Submission: Jan 12, 2021
Notification: Feb 22, 2020
Camera Ready: Mar 22, 2021

Overview

All submissions must conform to the ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 formatting and submission instructions and must not exceed the given page limits for the applicable type of submission. For research papers the limit is 10 pages for regular papers and 5 pages for short papers. All submissions must be in English. Page limits include all text, figures, tables, references, and appendices. Research papers are permitted up to two more pages containing only references. The page limit is strict, and purchase of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed at any point in the process (including after the paper is accepted). All submissions must be in PDF.
Formatting. Submissions must conform to the IEEE formatting instructions 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).
Authorship policy. By submitting to ICSSP/ICGSE 2021, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM and the authorship policy of the IEEE. Note in particular that submitted papers must reflect the original work of the authors, the authors must be entitled to publish the work, the work must not have been published previously in a refereed or formally reviewed publication, and the work must not be in press elsewhere while under review for ICSSP/ICGSE 2021, among other provisions.
Plagiarism policy. By submitting to ICSSP/ICGSE 2021, authors also 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 ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for ICSSP/ICGSE 2021. 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.
Submission site. Submissions must be made through the ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 submission site on EasyChair no later than the applicable submission deadline. Be sure to direct your submissions correctly and select the appropriate submission type when uploading your submission. We encourage authors to upload their paper info early (and can submit the PDF later, but still before or on the date of the submission deadline AoE) to support the management of the review process. Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk rejected by the PC Co-Chairs without further review. Notice: The official publication date is the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.
Proceedings. The proceedings will be published as part of the ICSE 2021 proceedings by IEEE Conference Publishing Services (IEEE CPS) under the copyright of IEEE. The proceedings will appear in the digital libraries of both ACM and IEEE. The proceedings will only contain papers that have been presented at ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 and for which at least one author has registered. Digital participation with corresponding registration at a reduced price will apply in case the conference is held virtually.
Journal Special Issue. Authors of selected technical papers of high-quality will be invited post-conference to submit extended versions of their work for a special issue of the Journal of Software: Evolution and Process (JSEP).
Reviewing. All submissions will be peer-reviewed by the ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 program committees. Each submitted research paper will receive reviews from at least three members of the program committee. ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 will employ a double-blind review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-blind review process. In particular, the authors’ names must be omitted from the submission and references to their prior work should be in the third person.
Requirement to Register, Attend and Present. Upon notification of acceptance, authors of accepted papers will be asked to complete a copyright form and will receive further instructions for preparing their camera-ready versions. At least one author of each accepted paper is expected to register for and attend the ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 conference and present the work. ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 have the right to pull papers out of the proceedings if there is no associated registration by two weeks past the authors’ registration deadline. All accepted contributions with at least one registered author will be published in the conference electronic proceedings and appear in the digital libraries of both IEEE and ACM.
Open Science Policy. ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 encourage authors to submit artifact packages and/or data sets with their papers, for the sake of transparency, reusability, replicability, and/or reproducibility, as well as for facilitating the peer review process. The following guidelines are recommendations and are not mandatory. Your choice will not affect the review process for your paper. Should you decide to embrace this policy, we strongly encourage you to archive empirical datasets on Zenodo or Dataverse, following Google guidelines to dataset providers, and share analysis scripts on freely accessible code repositories such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. Please, note that this shall be done in a way that does not reveal the names of the authors and violates the double-blinded review process.
Self-Archiving. ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 also encourage authors to self-archive a preprint of your accepted manuscript in arXiv.org or other similar open repositories. This is permitted by ACM and IEEE publishers for ICSE proceedings. Note that the final version of the paper, as laid out by the publisher, cannot be self-archived. Instead, manuscripts with reviewer comments addressed must be used, but before applying the camera-ready instructions and templates.
Sponsorship. As an ICSE 2021 collocated event, ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 is sponsored by IEEE-CS TCSE and ACM SIGSOFT.
Contact. Feel free to contact the ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 Program Co-Chairs for more details.