The ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA) is the leading research symposium on software testing and analysis, bringing together academics, industrial researchers, and practitioners to exchange new ideas, problems, and experience on how to analyze and test software systems.

New for ISSTA 2023: Dual submission deadlines

ISSTA 2023 will feature two submission deadlines: An early submission deadline (November 10, 2022) and a regular submission deadline (February 16, 2023). You can choose to submit at either deadline, but papers submitted to the first deadline may receive a chance to submit a major revision of the initial submission to the regular deadline, addressing the reviewer comments. Papers submitted to the regular deadline will be decided using only the traditional paper outcomes of accept or reject.

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

ISSTA invites three kinds of submissions. The clear majority of submissions is expected to be “Research Papers”, but submissions that best fit the description of “Experience Papers” or “Replicability Studies” should be submitted as such.

Research Papers

Authors are invited to submit research papers describing original contributions in testing or analysis of computer software. Papers describing original theoretical or empirical research, new techniques, methods for emerging systems, in-depth case studies, infrastructures of testing and analysis, or tools are welcome.

Experience Papers

Authors are invited to submit experience papers describing a significant experience in applying software testing and analysis methods or tools and should carefully identify and discuss important lessons learned so that other researchers and/or practitioners can benefit from the experience. Of special interest are experience papers that report on industrial applications of software testing and analysis methods or tools.

Replicability Studies

ISSTA would like to encourage researchers to replicate results from previous papers. A replicability study must go beyond simply re-implementing an algorithm and/or re-running the artifacts provided by the original paper. It should at the very least apply the approach to new, significantly broadened inputs. Particularly, replicability studies are encouraged to target techniques that previously were evaluated only on proprietary subject programs or inputs. A replicability study should clearly report on results that the authors were able to replicate as well as on aspects of the work that were not replicable. In the latter case, authors are encouraged to make an effort to communicate or collaborate with the original paper’s authors to determine the cause for any observed discrepancies and, if possible, address them (e.g., through minor implementation changes). We explicitly encourage authors to not focus on a single paper/artifact only, but instead to perform a comparative experiment of multiple related approaches.

In particular, replicability studies should follow the ACM guidelines on replicability (different team, different experimental setup): The measurement can be obtained with stated precision by a different team, a different measuring system, in a different location on multiple trials. For computational experiments, this means that an independent group can obtain the same result using artifacts which they develop completely independently. This means that it is also insufficient to focus on reproducibility (i.e., different team, same experimental setup) alone. Replicability Studies will be evaluated according to the following standards:

• Depth and breadth of experiments
• Clarity of writing
• Appropriateness of conclusions
• Amount of useful, actionable insights
• Availability of artifacts

We expect replicability studies to clearly point out the artifacts the study is built on, and to submit those artifacts to artifact evaluation (see below). Artifacts evaluated positively will be eligible to obtain the prestigious Results Reproduced badge.

Dual Submission Deadlines and Major Revisions

ISSTA 2023 features two submission deadlines: An early submission deadline (November 10, 2022) and a regular submission deadline (February 16, 2023). The instructions in this call apply to both deadlines. You can choose to submit at either deadline, but only papers submitted to the first deadline may receive a chance to submit a major revision of the initial submission to the regular deadline, addressing the reviewer comments. Papers submitted to the regular deadline will be decided using only the traditional paper outcomes of accept or reject.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions must be original and should not have been published previously or be under consideration for publication while being evaluated for ISSTA. Authors are required to adhere to the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the ACM Policy on Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submissions.

Research Papers, Experience Papers, and Replicability Studies should be at most 10 pages in length, with at most 2 additional pages for references. Experience papers and replicability studies should clearly specify their category in the paper title upon submission, e.g., “XXX (Experience Paper)”. All authors should use the official “ACM Master article template”, which can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template pages. Latex users should use the “sigconf” option, as well as the “review” (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers) and “anonymous” (omitting author names) options. To that end, the following Latex code can be placed at the start of the Latex document:

\documentclass[sigconf,review, anonymous]{acmart}
\acmConference[ISSTA 2023]{ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis}{17-21 July, 2023}{Seattle, USA}

Submit your papers via the HotCRP ISSTA 2023 submission website.

Each submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. Authors will have an opportunity to respond to reviews during a rebuttal period. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of originality, importance of contribution, soundness, evaluation, quality of presentation and appropriate comparison to related work. Some papers may have more than three reviews, as the PC chair may solicit additional reviews based on factors such as reviewer expertise and strong disagreement between reviewers. The authors will have a chance to read the additional reviews and respond to them during the additional short response period. The program committee as a whole will make final decisions about which submissions to accept for presentation at the conference.

Double-blind Reviewing

ISSTA 2023 will conduct double-blind reviewing. Submissions should not reveal the identity of the authors in any way. Authors should leave out author names and affiliations from the body of their submission. They should also ensure that any citations to related work by themselves are written in third person, that is, “the prior work of XYZ” as opposed to “our prior work”.

Double-blind reviewing should not hinder the usual communication of results. But, during the review period, please don’t broadcast the work on social media. Also, to the extent possible, consider not publishing preprints of your work during or right before the review period. If the authors have already published a version of their paper to arXiv or similar sites, we request authors to use a different title for their submission, so that author names are not inadvertently disclosed, e.g., via a notification on Google Scholar.

Authors with further questions on double-blind reviewing are encouraged to contact the Program Chair by email.

Open Science Policy

ISSTA has adopted an open science policy. Openness in science is key to fostering scientific progress via transparency, reproducibility, and replicability. The steering principle is that all research results should be accessible to the public, if possible, and that empirical studies should be reproducible. In particular, we actively support the adoption of open data and open source principles and encourage all contributing authors to disclose (anonymized and curated) data to increase reproducibility and replicability.

Upon submission, authors are asked to make their data available to the program committee (via upload of anonymized supplemental material or a link to an anonymized private or public repository) or to comment on why this is not possible or desirable. While sharing such a repository is not mandatory for submission or acceptance, this information will be passed to the program committee to inform its decision. Furthermore, authors are asked to indicate whether they intend to make their data publicly available upon acceptance.

Authors Take Note:

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of your conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.