Early Research Achievement (ERA) Track SANER 2024

Call For Paper

The 31st edition of the International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER’24) will feature an Early Research Achievements (ERA) track. The ERA track is specifically looking for fresh, innovative, provocative ideas. These ideas do not require a strong empirical evaluation.

The 2024 ERA track aims to be a forum for presenting promising ideas in early stages of research and provide constructive feedback to guide researchers and practitioners from their initial ideas and limited evaluations toward solid SANER 2025 papers with strong empirical underpinnings. We aim to create an open atmosphere where discussion and feedback stands central.

The topics of interest for the ERA track are the same as the main research track and concern all the topics in the research and practice of software analysis, evolution, and reengineering.

Evaluation Criteria

Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of their:

-Originality: Novelty of the work with respect to the literature (including grey literature if relevant).

-Potential impact: The extent to which the idea may impact the (future) work of practitioners, researchers, and/or other stakeholders.

-Technical soundness and evaluation: Preliminary evidence of the reliability of the technical contribution.

-Quality of presentation: Clarity and precision of the communication of the ideas.

Emphasis will be put on the originality of the proposed contribution; a full evaluation of the proposed ideas is not required.

Submission Instructions

Papers must not exceed five pages (including all text, figures, references, and appendices) Papers must conform to the IEEE proceedings paper format guidelines Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format via the SANER 2024 EasyChair submission site

Important note: SANER 2024 follows a full double-anonymous review process. In order to be compliant with the double-anonymous policy, submitted papers must adhere to the following rules (largely reused from ASE 2017 double-anonymous instructions):

-Author names and affiliations must be omitted;

-References to authors’ own related work must be in the third person. (For example, not We build on our previous work… but rather We build on the work of…);

-There may be cases in which the current submission is a clear follow-up of one of your previous works, and despite what was recommended in the previous point, reviewers will clearly associate authorship of such a previous work with the current submission. In this case, you may decide to anonymize the reference itself at submission time. For example: based on previous results [10] .. where the reference is reported as [10] Anonymous Authors. Omitted per double-blind reviewing. In doing so, however, please make sure that the SANER 2024 submission is self-contained and its content can be reviewed and understood without accessing the previous paper;

-Do not include acknowledgments of people, grants, organizations, etc. that would give away your identity. You may, of course, add these acknowledgments in the camera-ready version;

-If you use an identifiable naming convention for your work, such as a project name, use a different name for your submission, which you may indicate has been changed for the purposes of double-blind reviewing. This includes names that may unblind individual authors and their institutions. For example, if your project is called GoogleDeveloperHelper, which makes it clear the work was done at Google, for the submission version, use the name DeveloperHelper or BigCompanyDeveloperHelper instead;

-Avoid revealing the institution affiliations of authors or at which the work was performed. For example, if the evaluation includes a user study conducted with undergraduates from the CS 101 class that you teach, you might say “The study participants consist of 200 students in an introductory CS course”. You can of course add the institutional information to the camera-ready. Similar suggestions apply for work conducted in specific organizations (e.g., industrial studies). In such cases, avoid mentioning the organization’s name. Instead, you may just refer to the organization as Org or Company, etc. When appropriate and when this does not help too much in revealing the company’s name, you might mention the context (e.g., financial organization, videogame development company, etc.);

-Avoid linking directly to code repositories or tool deployments which can reveal your identity. Whenever possible, please use the EasyChair additional material field to submit a .zip or .tgz file including additional material. This is of course possible for small attachments. In other cases, you may post anonymized links (with a warning that the following said link may reveal authors’ identities), including links to anonymized code or deployments. When creating such repositories, a good practice can be asking somebody in your team to test the anonymization of the repository and of its content. In case anonymization is difficult to achieve and you still want to provide availability of data/tools, you can simply state that you will link to the code or deployment in the camera-ready version. Program committee members are asked to keep into account the double-blind policy when reviewing papers, and therefore not require full availability of artifacts at submission time.

-SANER 2024 believes in open science and that open science aids reproducibility and replicability. To improve these factors we encourage authors to consider disclosing the source code and datasets used within their paper, including extractors, survey data, etc. By sharing this information your contribution will be more impactful because others can follow up on your work and of course cite it. Please consider using Zenodo, Figshare, or other services that provide DOIs and allow anonymous and semi-anonymous methods of archiving software and datasets. Archive.org is recommended for the dissemination of larger datasets. These datasets, anonymized through Zenodo and other services, should be linked within the paper itself. Instructions for double-blind friendly uploading of datasets are available here: https://ineed.coffee/post/how-to-disclose-data-for-double-blind-review-and-make-it-archived-open-data-upon-acceptance.html.

Important Dates

-Abstract submission deadline: November 13, 2023 AoE

-Paper submission deadline: November 20, 2023 AoE

-Notifications: December 22, 2023 AoE

-Camera Ready: January 12, 2024 AoE