Industry Innovations TrackISEC 2027

Call for Articles, Experience Reports and Practitioner Contributions

The Industry Innovations Track at ISEC 2027 is a forum for practitioners to share ideas, innovations, experiences, and engineering practices that have emerged from real world software development.

Software engineering has always advanced through a combination of research and practice. While research conferences provide an important venue for rigorous scientific contributions, many of the ideas that shape industrial practice are first communicated through engineering blogs, technical essays, design documents, white papers, conference talks, and open-source projects rather than traditional research papers. These contributions often have enormous practical impact but are rarely submitted to research conferences because preparing a conventional academic paper with extensive related work, formal evaluation, and a research-oriented structure, requires significant additional effort.

The Industry Innovations Track is designed to bridge this gap.

Our goal is to lower the barrier to sharing impactful software engineering ideas - not to lower the quality of ideas. We seek contributions that communicate valuable insights, engineering innovations, lessons learned, and emerging practices, even when they do not fit the structure or expectations of a traditional research paper.

Whether you have built a novel engineering solution, introduced an innovative development practice, deployed AI at scale, learned important lessons from a failed project, or have an engineering insight that deserves wider discussion, we encourage you to share it with the ISEC community.

Scope

We welcome submissions from practitioners across all areas of software engineering, including but not limited to:

• AI-assisted software development

• Software architecture and design

• Software testing and quality assurance

• DevOps and continuous delivery

• Developer productivity

• Program analysis and software maintenance

• Legacy system modernization

• Platform engineering

• Cloud-native software engineering

• Security engineering

• Reliability and observability

• Large-scale software engineering

• Engineering culture and organizational practices

• Open-source software engineering

• Developer tools and infrastructure

• Engineering management and technical leadership

Submissions describing work in progress, lessons learned, engineering failures, or emerging practices are also welcome if they offer useful insights for the community.

What Can Be Submitted?

The track welcomes a broad range of practitioner-oriented contributions, including:

Industry Articles

Concise articles describing an engineering innovation, technical idea, or software engineering practice.

Experience Reports

Accounts of deploying, operating, or scaling software systems, engineering processes, AI systems, testing frameworks, or developer tools.

Case Studies

Real-world experiences from industrial software development projects, including challenges encountered and lessons learned.

Technical Essays

Thought-provoking articles presenting new perspectives, engineering philosophies, design principles, or observations about software engineering practice.

Engineering Blogs

Existing or newly written technical blogs that contain ideas or experiences valuable to the software engineering community.

Tool and Platform Reports

Descriptions of internally developed or open-source tools, platforms, frameworks, or infrastructure that significantly improve software engineering practice.

Lessons from Failure

Engineering experiences describing unsuccessful approaches, unexpected outcomes, or mistakes that provide valuable learning for others.

Emerging Ideas

Promising concepts, engineering directions, or innovative practices that may still be evolving but are likely to influence future software engineering.

Submission Formats

To encourage participation from practitioners, authors may submit in one of several formats.

Industry Article

Typically 3-6 pages describing:

• The problem,

• The proposed idea,

• Engineering approach,

• Practical experience,

• Lessons learned, and

• Key takeaways.

A traditional research-paper structure is not required.

Technical Essay

A concise essay presenting an engineering insight, design philosophy, or perspective on software engineering practice.

Experience Report

A report describing experiences from developing, deploying, or maintaining software systems in industry.

Blog-to-Talk

Authors may submit an existing technical blog, engineering article, white paper, or similar technical writing for consideration as a conference presentation.

Presentation Proposal

Authors who wish to present ideas without writing a complete article may submit an extended abstract or presentation proposal.

Presentation and Publication

The primary objective of the Industry Innovations Track is to facilitate the exchange of ideas between practitioners and the software engineering community. Accordingly, acceptance to the track is primarily for presentation at ISEC, while publication in the conference proceedings is optional rather than mandatory.

Authors may choose one of the following paths:

Presentation Only

Authors who simply wish to share their ideas, experiences, engineering practices, or technical insights may present at the conference without publishing an archival paper.

This option is particularly suitable for:

• Engineering blogs,

• Technical essays,

• Practitioner experience reports,

• Design philosophies,

• Engineering lessons,

• Industrial case studies, and

• Work that authors prefer not to publish formally.

Presentation with Proceedings Publication

Some submissions may naturally lend themselves to publication as archival papers. The Program Committee may invite selected authors to prepare a proceedings version of their article for publication in the ISEC proceedings.

These submissions will undergo an additional review focused on readiness for archival publication. The Program Committee will work with the authors to help evolve suitable contributions into proceedings-quality papers where appropriate.

Participation in this process is entirely optional. Authors may decline proceedings publication while still presenting their work at ISEC.

Our objective is to maximize the dissemination of valuable industrial innovations while providing an archival publication pathway for contributions that would benefit from it.

Important Note on ACM Open Access Publication

Authors who choose to publish their accepted paper in the ACM Digital Library proceedings may be required to pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) if their organization/institution is not a participant in the ACM Open program. A list of participating organizations/institutions is available at https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen/open-participants.

Any applicable APC is separate from the conference registration fee and is payable directly to ACM after paper acceptance, should the authors opt for publication in the ACM Digital Library proceedings.

Authors from World Bank-designated Lower-Middle Income Countries are eligible for a 50% discount, reducing the APC to US$250/article for ACM members (or US$375/article if none of the authors is an ACM/SIG member). https://authors.acm.org/open-access/initiatives-services-authors-site#2027-Subsidized-APC-Pricing

Evaluation Criteria

Submissions will be evaluated primarily on:

• Practical relevance

• Novelty or originality

• Demonstrated and potential impact on software engineering practice

• Clarity of presentation

• Quality of insights and lessons learned

• Usefulness to practitioners

Unlike the research track, submissions will not be judged primarily on:

• Extensive related work,

• Comprehensive experimental evaluation,

• Formal hypotheses,

• Statistical significance, or

• Adherence to a traditional academic paper structure.

Evidence supporting the contribution is encouraged whenever available, but the emphasis is on the value of the ideas and experiences being shared.

At the Conference

Accepted contributions will be presented in dedicated Industry Innovations sessions.

Depending on the nature of the submission, presentations may take the form of:

• Technical talks,

• Experience reports,

• Invited panel discussions,

• Demonstrations, or

• Practitioner panels.

Why Submit?

Many of the most influential ideas in software engineering have originated from practitioners and have been shared through blogs, essays, developer forum talks, technical reports, and open-source communities long before they appeared in academic literature, or without ever appearing there.

The Industry Innovations Track aims to provide these ideas with a home at ISEC.

If your contribution has changed the way software is built, tested, deployed, maintained, or understood, even if it does not resemble a traditional research paper, we would like to hear about it.

Come share your experiences, inspire the community, and help shape the future of software engineering.

We Invite You to Share Your Story

Software engineering advances not only through research, but also through the countless innovations created every day by practitioners building real systems.

Whether your contribution is an engineering breakthrough, a hard-earned lesson from production, an innovative AI-assisted workflow, a technical philosophy, or an idea first shared as a blog post, we invite you to bring it to the ISEC community.

If your work can help software engineers build better software, we want to hear about it.

How to Submit

Submissions should be made through the ISEC 2027 submission system.

Presentation and Publication

Authors submitting under the Presentation and Publication category should prepare their manuscript using the ACM proceedings template.

ACM Proceedings Template:
https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template

Presentation Only

Authors submitting under the Presentation Only category may also use the ACM proceedings template if they wish. Alternatively, they may submit a PDF prepared using any clear, readable, and professional document format. The emphasis is on effectively communicating the idea rather than adhering to a specific paper format.

Submission Site

All submissions should be made through the ISEC 2027 HotCRP submission system:

Submission Link:
https://isec27.hotcrp.com/