Doctoral SymposiumISSTA 2025

About

The ISSTA/FSE 2025 Joint Doctoral Symposium will bring together doctoral students working in software engineering and allow them to present and discuss their research goals, methods, and results in a constructive and international atmosphere.

The goals of the Doctoral Symposium are to:

• Provide the participants with independent and constructive feedback on their current research and future research directions;
• Develop a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research;
• Provide an opportunity for student participants to interact with established researchers and practitioners in the software engineering community

Participating students will have the unique opportunity to describe their research ideas and receive comments and suggestions from experienced software engineering researchers.

Call for Papers

About

The ISSTA/FSE 2025 Joint Doctoral Symposium will bring together doctoral students working in software engineering and allow them to present and discuss their research goals, methods, and results in a constructive and international atmosphere.

The goals of the Doctoral Symposium are to:

• Provide the participants with independent and constructive feedback on their current research and future research directions;
• Develop a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research;
• Provide an opportunity for student participants to interact with established researchers and practitioners in the software engineering community

Participating students will have the unique opportunity to describe their research ideas and receive comments and suggestions from experienced software engineering researchers.

Important Dates

All dates are 23:59:59 AoE (UTC-12h).

• Submission Deadline: February 24, 2025
• Notification: April 10, 2025
• Camera-Ready Version: April 24, 2025
• Doctoral Symposium: during conference week

Submissions

To apply as a student participating in the Doctoral Symposium, you must prepare a research proposal. We distinguish three submission categories: Starter, Consolidator, and Advanced.

Starter Submissions

Starter submissions (two pages) are for students who have not yet developed their dissertation topic and are seeking feedback on research progress to date. Starter submissions should focus on:

• The research problem or area you are targeting and its importance to the field;
• A brief survey of the background and related work

Consolidator Submissions

Consolidator submissions (four pages) are for students who have developed a research proposal with first results and are seeking feedback toward the successful completion of their thesis and defense. In addition to the topics for starter submissions, consolidator submissions are also expected to contain:

• A description of the proposed approach;
• The expected contributions of your research;
• An evaluation plan for the stated contributions;
• Any results achieved so far

Advanced Submissions

Advanced submissions (two pages) are for students about to complete their PhD thesis and prepare to apply for research positions. Accepted authors will be invited to present their job application talk and get feedback. In addition to the topics for starter submissions, advanced submissions are also expected to contain:

• The central contributions of your research;
• Evidence for the stated contributions;
• (Possible) impact and relevance of your work;
• Research plans after the PhD

How to Prepare your Submission

At the time of submission, all papers must conform to the FSE 2025 Format and Submission Guidelines (but they should not be anonymized), and must not exceed two pages (starter, advanced) or four pages (consolidator) including all text, references, and figures; submissions that do not comply with these requirements will be rejected by the chairs without review.

Your submission must be single-authored and include the title of your research, your name, your advisor (if you have one), your email address, and a short summary in the style of an abstract for a regular paper.

Starter and Consolidator submissions whose authors opt in for publication (see below) must be original work, not previously published, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere (see also ACM policy and procedures concerning plagiarism).

How to Submit

A submission consists of two documents in a single PDF file:

1. Your research proposal as described above;
2. A signed letter by your PhD advisor stating:

• Your current status and progress towards a PhD;
• That they are aware of your submission;
• That they will attend at least one rehearsal of your presentation before the symposium.

PhD advisors who want to share confidential comments are welcome to e-mail the chairs, Federica Sarro (f.sarro@ucl.ac.uk), Andreas Zeller (zeller@cispa.de), Jie M. Zhang (jie.zhang@kcl.ac.uk), and Darko Marinov (marinov@illinois.edu).

Merge these two into a single PDF and submit it via the submission website (link announced soon).

The PDF must be received by the submission deadline.

Evaluation

The Doctoral Symposium chairs will select participants using the following criteria:

• Quality of the research proposal and its relevance to ISSTA and FSE;
• Quality of the proposal presentation

Attending

All authors of accepted submissions must register for the ISSTA/FSE 2025 Doctoral Symposium and present their work there as a poster and a lighting talk. Starter and Consolidator authors may also opt in to publish their submission in a companion volume to the ISSTA 2025 or FSE 2025 Conference Proceedings.

In addition, a subset of Starter and Consolidator authors will be invited to present their work in a short talk with discussion and feedback, and a subset of Advanced authors will be invited to give a brief job application talk with discussion and feedback.

Invited Speakers

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Program

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