Doctoral SymposiumVARIABILITY 2026

Accepted Papers

Call for Doctoral Symposium Papers

Context

The Doctoral Symposium of VARIABILITY 2026 aims to provide a supportive environment that enables doctoral students to get constructive feedback on their research. Students will discuss their work with experienced community members and other students. The event is open to any PhD student whose research topic concerns software variability, software and systems reuse, product lines, and configuration. This includes PhD students at early stages of their research (after setting up a research program, but before having results). Accordingly, we will have two submission categories:

• Late – late-stage PhD students, having at least 6 months of work after the conference and before their expected completion; and
• Early – early-stage PhD students, with at least 6 months of work already performed prior to the submission date.

Important Dates

• Doctoral symposium submission: 21/06/2026 (AOE)
• Doctoral symposium notification: 15/07/2026 (AOE)
• Camera-ready & author registration: 24/07/2026 (AOE)

Submissions/Publishing

Requirements

• The research problem being addressed and its importance
• The research methodology and techniques being applied
• The solution being proposed, its novelty and validity
• The relation of the work with the state-of-the-art
• Preliminary results and their impact (for the ‘late’ category)

• Front matter: Title, your name, email address, abstract
• Introduction and Motivation: Introduction, description of the problem tackled and its importance; what the literature says about this problem and where existing work fails; how you plan to tackle this problem; what results you envision; how you plan to validate your solution.
• Research Questions: Clearly state the research questions you plan to address and any assumptions you make.
• Research Methodology and Approach: The research methodology you plan to use (e.g., design science, action research), including the techniques you plan to use (e.g., formalisation, algorithm specification, case studies). In line with your research methodology, describe your research approach: what novel methods and/or technology you are going to build, how you are going to do that, including aspects such as data collection, software prototyping and evaluation. Discuss any threats to validity you can envision and expect to address (to the extent possible).
• Preliminary Results (for the ‘late’ category): Overview of the results you achieved so far. Provide an example to explain how the solution obtained so far works. This is only applicable to the ‘late’ category.
• Work plan:
Both categories of submissions should consider an overall work plan for the whole thesis. Submissions for the ‘late’ category can mention which parts of the work plan they have reached so far. Both categories of submissions should consider the schedule for the next 12 months.

Submission format

• Early category: 6 pages (+2 pages for references only)
• Late category: 8 pages (+2 pages for references only)

Evaluation

Format of the Symposium