Research TrackMOBILESoft 2024

Call for Papers

The technical papers track of MOBILESoft invites high-quality submissions involving both established and emerging solutions for mobile software engineering. These include (but are not limited to) technological advancements, architectural approaches, software security, advancements in design and implementation methods, testing and analysis approaches, user interfaces and HCI, business and organizational issues, and empirical studies. We solicit:

• Full research papers (up to 10 pages +2 pages for references only):
• Significant new research contributions.
• Research that directly impacts mobile software engineering practice.
• New idea papers (up to 4 pages +1 page for references only):
• Exciting new directions or techniques that may have yet to be supported by solid experimental results, but are nonetheless supported by strong and well-argued scientific intuitions or preliminary results, as well as concrete plans going forward.
• Novel studies reporting preliminary insights.
• Challenge papers (up to 2 pages +1 page for references only):
• New perspectives that call into question long-held beliefs or conventions.
• Challenges faced by tech organizations and companies. Challenges should include relevant information and links to data for researchers to attempt to address them.

Papers should include methodology, implementation, results, and discussion as appropriate. Solutions are expected to be rigorously evaluated. The paper must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review elsewhere whilst under consideration at MOBILESoft. We invite contributions from both academia and industry.

Formatting and Submission Instructions

All authors should use the official “ACM Primary Article Template”, as can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page. 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[ICSE 2024]{46th International Conference on Software Engineering}{April 2024}{Lisbon, Portugal}

All submissions must be in PDF. The page limit is strict. Papers that do not conform to these guidelines will be desk rejected before the review process.

MOBILESoft 2024 will follow 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: (i) the authors’ names must be omitted from the submission, (ii) references to their prior work should be in the third person, and (iii) supplementary material (e.g., experiment replication package, YouTube video, source code of the proposed approach) should be provided anonymously. Any submission that does not comply with the double-blind review process will be rejected by the Technical Track PC Co-Chairs without further review. For information on the double-blind review process, please see the Q&A page from prior ICSEs.

Open Science Policy

Just like leading software engineering conferences, such as ICSE, the steering principle of the Open Science policy of MOBILESoft 2024 is that all research results should be accessible to the public and, if possible, 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. Note that sharing research data is not mandatory for submission or acceptance. However, sharing is expected to be the default, and non-sharing needs to be justified. We recognize that reproducibility or replicability is not a goal in qualitative research and that, similar to industrial studies, qualitative studies often face challenges in sharing research data. For guidelines on how to report qualitative research to ensure the assessment of the reliability and credibility of research results, see the Q&A page from prior ICSEs.

Upon submission to the research track, authors are asked:

• to make their data available to the program committee (via upload of supplemental material or a link to an anonymous repository) – and provide instructions on how to access this data in the paper, possibly in a section named “Data Availability” after the Conclusions; or
• to include in the paper an explanation as to why this is not possible or desirable; and
• to indicate if they intend to make their data publicly available upon acceptance. At least one reviewer will check whether the enclosed package contains what is declared in the paper. This quality check process will be very lightweight, and the main aim is to ensure that authors do not submit (partially) empty packages.

Submission

Submissions to the Technical Track can be made via hotCRP.

Review Criteria

Each paper submitted to the Technical Papers Track will be evaluated based on the following criteria (we rely in part on ICSE Review Criteria 2024).

1. Novelty: The novelty and innovativeness of contributed solutions, problem formulations, methodologies, theories and/or evaluations, i.e., the extent to which the paper is sufficiently original with respect to state-of-the-art.
2. Rigor: The soundness, clarity and depth of a technical or theoretical contribution, and the level of thoroughness and completeness of an evaluation.
3. Relevance: The significance and/or potential impact of the research to the field of software engineering.
4. Verifiability and Transparency: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to understand how an innovation works; to understand how data was obtained, analyzed, and interpreted; and how the paper supports independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions. Any artifacts attached to or linked from the paper may be checked by one reviewer.
5. Presentation: The clarity of the exposition in the paper.

Reviewers will carefully consider all of the above criteria during the review process, and authors should take great care in clearly addressing them all. The paper should clearly explain and justify the claimed contributions.

Conference Attendance Expectation

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for MOBILESoft 2024 and present the paper.