Research TrackMOBILESoft 2025

Call for Papers

The technical papers track of MOBILESoft invites high-quality submissions involving significant, novel, and emerging solutions for mobile (e.g., Android, iOS, OpenHarmony, etc.) application 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

Submissions must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the 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). Note that IEEE format is being used this year, whereas last year it was ACM format, hence the appearance will differ from year to year.

All submissions must be in PDF. The page limit is strict, and it will not be possible to purchase additional pages at any point in the process (including after acceptance).Submissions must strictly conform to the IEEE conference proceedings formatting instructions specified above. Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in desk rejection without further review.

MOBILESoft will employ a double-anonymous review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-anonymous review process. In particular:

• Authors’ names must be omitted from the submission.
• All references to the author’s prior work should be in the third person.
• While authors have the right to upload preprints on ArXiV or similar sites, they must avoid specifying that the manuscript was submitted to MOBILESoft 2025.
• During review, authors should not publicly use the submission title. We recommend using a different paper title for any pre-print in arXiv or similar websites.
• Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-anonymous review process can be found on the Q&A page from ICSE

Open Science Policy

Just like leading software engineering conferences, such as ICSE, the steering principle of the Open Science policy of MOBILESoft 2025 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 ICSE.

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.

Important Dates

• Abstract Deadline: November 19, 2024 AoE (Extended to Dec. 6, 2024)
• Paper Deadline: Dec. 6, 2024 AoE
• Author Notification: January 17, 2025 AoE
• Camera Ready Deadline: February 05, 2025 AoE

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 2025).

• 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 the state-of-the-art.
• Rigor: The soundness, clarity, and depth of a technical or theoretical contribution, and the level of thoroughness and completeness of an evaluation.
• Relevance: The significance and/or potential impact of the research on the field of software engineering.
• 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 will be checked by one reviewer.
• 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. Each paper will be handled by an area chair who will ensure reviewing consistency among papers submitted within that area.

Conference Attendance Expectation

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for MOBILESoft 2025 and present the paper.

Journal Extension Opportunities

Selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version of the paper in the Special Issue on Advances in Mobile App Analysis and Systems (CCF B) in the ASE Journal.