ICSE 2021 – Technical Track

ICSE is the premier forum for presenting and discussing the most recent and significant technical research contributions in the field of Software Engineering. We invite high quality submissions of technical research papers describing original and unpublished results of software engineering research. We welcome submissions addressing topics across the full spectrum of Software Engineering including but not limited to:

• AI and software engineering 
  • Search-based software engineering
  • Machine learning with and for SE
  • Recommender systems
  • Autonomic systems and self adaptation
  • Program synthesis
  • Program repair  
• Testing and analysis 
  • Software testing
  • Program analysis
  • Validation and Verification
  • Fault localization
  • Formal methods
  • Programming languages  
• Empirical software engineering 
  • Mining software repositories
  • Apps and app store Analysis
  • Software ecosystems
  • Qualitative research methods  
• Software evolution 
  • Evolution and maintenance
  • Debugging
  • Program comprehension
  • API design and evolution
  • Configuration management
  • Release engineering and DevOps
  • Software reuse
  • Refactoring
  • Reverse engineering
  • Software visualization  
• Social aspects of software engineering 
  • Human aspects of software engineering
  • Human-computer interaction
  • Distributed and collaborative software engineering
  • Agile methods and software processes
  • Software economics
  • Crowd-based software engineering
  • Ethics in software engineering  
• Requirements, modeling, and design 
  • Requirements Engineering
  • Modeling and Model-Driven Engineering
  • Software Architecture and Design
  • Tools and Environments
  • Variability and product lines
  • Parallel, Distributed, and Concurrent Systems]
  • Software services  
• Dependability 
  • Software Security
  • Privacy
  • Reliability and Safety
  • Performance
  • Green and sustainable technologies
  • Embedded / cyber-physical systems
  • Mobile applications

Review Criteria

Each paper submitted to the Technical Track will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

• Soundness: The extent to which the paper’s contributions are supported by rigorous application of appropriate research methods
• Significance: The extent to which the paper’s contributions are important with respect to open software engineering challenges
• Novelty: The extent to which the contribution is sufficiently original and is clearly explained with respect to the state-of-the-art
• Verifiability: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to support independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions
• Presentation: The extent to which the paper’s quality of writing meets the high standards of ICSE, including clear descriptions and explanations, adequate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and adherence to the formatting instructions provided below

Reviewers will carefully consider all of these criteria during the review process, and as a result, high-quality papers may vary considerably in their type of contribution. For example, one paper could provide an extensive replication of prior work while another could describe a highly novel approach supported by non-trivial experimentation or empirical analysis.

How to Submit

• All submissions must conform to the ICSE 2021 formatting and submission instructions and must not exceed 10 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, appendices, etc. Two more pages containing only references are permitted. 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 the paper is accepted).
• Submissions must conform to the IEEE formatting instructions 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).
• By submitting to the ICSE Technical Track, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. In particular, papers submitted to ICSE 2021 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for ICSE 2021. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate action will be taken in all such cases. To check for double submission and plagiarism issues, the chairs reserve the right to (1) share the list of submissions with the PC Chairs of other conferences with overlapping review periods and (2) use external plagiarism detection software, under contract to the ACM or IEEE, to detect violations of these policies.
• The ICSE 2021 Technical Track will employ 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, the authors’ names must be omitted from the submission and references to their prior work should be in the third person. Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-blind review process can be found in the Q&A page.
• By submitting to the ICSE Technical Track, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM, and the authorship policy of the IEEE

Submissions to the Technical Track that meet the above requirements can be made via the Technical Track submission site (https://icse2021.hotcrp.com) by the submission deadline. We encourage the authors to upload their paper info early (and can submit the PDF later) to properly enter conflicts for double-blind reviewing.

Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk rejected by the Technical Track PC Chairs without further review.

Supplementary Material

Supplementary material can be uploaded via the HotCRP site or anonymously linked from the paper submission. Although PC members are not obligated to look at this material, we strongly encourage submitters to use supplementary material to provide access to anonymized code or data, whenever possible. Please carefully review any supplementary material to ensure it conforms to the double-blind policy (described above). For example, code and data repositories may be exported to remove version control history, scrubbed of names in comments and metadata, and anonymously uploaded to a sharing site to support review. One resource that may be helpful in accomplishing this task is this blog post: https://ineed.coffee/5205/how-to-disclose-data-for-double-blind-review-and-make-it-archived-open-data-upon-acceptance/

Upon acceptance, authors have the possibility to separately submit their supplementary material to the ICSE 2021 Artifact Evaluation track, for recognition of artifacts that are reusable, available, replicated or reproduced.

Important Dates

• Technical Track Submissions Deadline: 28 August 2020
• Technical Track Acceptance Notification: 17 December 2020
• Technical Track Camera Ready: 12 February 2021

Conference Attendance Expectation

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for ICSE 2021 and present the paper. The presentation is expected to be delivered in person, unless this is impossible due to travel limitations (related to, e.g., health, visa, or COVID-19 prevention).

Double Blind Frequently Asked Questions

The ICSE 2021 Technical track will adopt a double-blind review process. Further advice, guidance and explanation about the double-blind review process can be found in the Q&A page. This FAQ’s is based on guidelines for double-blind reviewing from ASE 2020 and ICSE 2020*.