ICSE is the premier forum for presenting and discussing the most recent and significant technical research contributions in the field of Software Engineering. In the technical track, we invite high quality submissions of technical research papers describing original and unpublished results of software engineering research.

Please note the following important changes for 2022:

Point out the significance of your research contributions (see review criteria).

Follow our open science policy – share data and justify if you do not.

Give your submission a unique title that is different from preprints and talks.

Areas of Interest
We welcome submissions addressing topics across the full spectrum of Software Engineering including the areas of:

AI and software engineering, including

Search-based software engineering
Machine learning with and for SE
Recommender systems
Autonomic systems and self adaptation
Program synthesis
Program repair
Testing and analysis, including

Software testing
Program analysis
Debugging and Fault localization
Programming languages
Performance
Mobile applications
Software analytics, including

Mining software repositories
Apps and app store analysis
Software ecosystems
Configuration management
Software visualization
Software evolution, including

Evolution and maintenance
API design and evolution
Release engineering and DevOps
Software reuse
Refactoring
Program comprehension
Reverse engineering
Social aspects of software engineering, including

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
Green and sustainable technologies
Requirements, modeling, and design, including

Requirements Engineering
Privacy and Security by Design
Modeling and Model-Driven Engineering
Software Architecture and Design
Variability and product lines
Software services
Dependability, including

Formal methods
Validation and Verification
Reliability and Safety
Privacy and Security
Embedded and cyber-physical systems
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 can and will impact the future of software engineering, and if needed, under which assumptions

Novelty: The extent to which the contributions are sufficiently original 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, as well as 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 authors should take great care in clearly addressing them all. The paper should clearly explain the claimed contributions, and how they are sound, significant, novel, and verifiable, as described above.

How to Submit
All submissions must conform to the ICSE 2022 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 strictly conform to the ACM formatting instructions. Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in desk rejection without further review.

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 2022 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for ICSE 2022. 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 2022 Technical Track will employ a doubly-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.
The title of the submission must be different from preprints of the authors on ArXiV or similar sites. During review, authors must not publicly use the submission title.
Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-anonymous 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://icse2022.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-anonymous reviewing. Authors are encouraged to try out the experimental SIGSOFT Submission Checker to detect violations to the formatting and double anonymous guidelines. Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk rejected without further review.

Open Science Policy
The research track of ICSE 2022 is governed by the ICSE 2022 Open Science policies. In summary, the steering principle is that all research results should be accessible to the public, if possible, and that 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.

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; 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.

Supplementary material can be uploaded via the HotCRP site or anonymously linked from the paper submission. Although PC members are not required to look at this material, we strongly encourage authors to use supplementary material to provide access to anonymized code or data, whenever possible. Authors are asked to carefully review any supplementary material to ensure it conforms to the double-anonymous 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.

Upon acceptance, authors have the possibility to separately submit their supplementary material to the ICSE 2022 Artifact Evaluation track, for recognition of artifacts that are reusable, available, replicated or reproduced.

Mentoring for prospective Authors
We will organize an “Ask me Anything” (AMA) Session on Best practices for a successful ICSE paper in early June for prospective authors to learn from past ICSE chairs. The date will be announced here.

Author Response Period
ICSE 2022 will offer a three day author response period. In this period the authors will have the opportunity to inspect the reviews, and answer to specific questions raised by the program committee. This period is scheduled after all reviews have been completed, and serves to inform the subsequent decision making process. Authors will be able to see the full reviews, including the reviewer scores as part of the author response process.

Withdrawing a Paper
Authors can withdraw their paper at any moment until the final decision has been made, through the paper submission system. Resubmitting the paper to another venue before the final decision has been made without withdrawing from ICSE 2022 first is considered a violation of the concurrent submission policy, and will lead to automatic rejection from ICSE 2022 as well as any other venue adhering to this policy.

Important Dates
Technical Track Submissions Deadline: August 27, 2021

Technical Track Author Response Period: November 10, 2021

Technical Track Acceptance Notification: December 3, 2021

Technical Track Camera Ready: February 11, 2022

Conference Attendance Expectation
If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for ICSE 2022 and present the paper. [We will add more info on this as soon as the ICSE 2022 format is finalized.]