Call for Papers

The IEEE/ACM Automated Software Engineering (ASE) Conference series is the premier research forum for automated software engineering. Each year, it brings together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss foundations, techniques, and tools for automating the analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance of large software systems. ASE 2026 invites high-quality contributions describing significant, original, and unpublished results.

New This Year

Early Rejection stage: to bring authors a quick response turnaround and reduce burden on both authors and reviewers for the rebuttal stage, a paper that receives all negative scores will be rejected early, before the rebuttal period.
Mandatory Data Availability Statement: to be placed in the paper submission after Conclusions and within the 10-page limit. To solve the problem PC members are often confused about the status of the availability of data, or artifacts, or reproduction packages, we require a Data Availability Statement (so far this was actively supported and encouraged, now we would require it). The data or reproduction packages (aka artifacts) are to be published publicly and anonymously via a DOI providing long-term archive. All data that led to the results in the paper must be available to the reviewers and readers. There are cases in which this is not appropriate, which are to be explained in the Data Availability Statement in the submitted paper.

Improvements carried on from ASE 2025

Major Revisions. Instead of rejecting the paper, we provide reviewers with the opportunity to request changes that may require up to four weeks to accommodate. In case of a Revision outcome, reviewers specify concrete and actionable revision criteria and agree to accept the paper in principle if these criteria are met. The authors have the opportunity to submit a revision together with a point-by-point summary-of-changes corresponding to each revision criterion. The authors are notified about the outcome for that revision after it is checked by the discussion lead.

tl;dr

Submission link: https://ase26.hotcrp.com
Template: \documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart}
Page limit: 10 pages (excl. references) + 2 pages (only references).
Artifact: Link to anonymous artifact, or explanation why not.
Categories: Choose a Research Area and a Paper Type (Technical/Experience)
Compliance: Check compliance (double-blind, plagiarism, human studies, etc)

Research Areas

ASE welcomes submissions addressing topics across the full spectrum of Automated Software Engineering. Topics of interest include the following and are grouped into the following nine research areas. Please note that these topics are by no means exhaustive. Each submission will need to indicate one primary and optionally a secondary area. Program chairs will ultimately assign a paper to an area chair (and at least three reviewers), considering the authors’ selection, the paper’s content, and other factors such as (if applicable) possible conflicts of interest.

The areas and examples of topics within this area
Requirements and Design

Requirements elicitation and management, traceability analysis
Software architecture and design
Modeling and model-driven engineering
Software product lines
Component-based or service-oriented systems
Object-oriented or aspect-oriented systems

Testing and Analysis

Regression, mutation, and model-based testing
System, unit, and integration testing
Black-, grey-, and white-box fuzzing
Automated program repair and synthesis
Static and dynamic analysis
Empirical program analysis

Maintenance and Evolution

Debugging and fault-localization
Refactoring and reengineering
Reverse engineering
Software reuse
API design and management

Human and Social Aspects

Software engineering processes (e.g., agile, DevOps)
Green and sustainable technologies
Software engineering ethics and values
Software economics
Systematic code review and inspection
Program comprehension and visualization
Crowd-based and collaborative software engineering
Human-computer interface

AI and Software Engineering

Autonomous and self-adapting systems
Search-based software engineering
Recommender systems
AI4SE
SE4AI

Software Analytics

Mining software repositories
Analysis of mobile apps, app stores
Data-driven user experience understanding and improvement
Data-driven decision making in software engineering
Software metrics (and measurements)

Formal Aspects of Software Engineering

Formal methods and model checking
Programming languages
Domain-specific or specification languages
Software validation and verification

Security and Other Non-Functional Properties

Security and privacy
Dependability and safety
Reliability and availability
Performance

ASE welcomes submissions addressing topics across the full spectrum of software engineering and a variety of application domains, including mobile, cloud, blockchains, embedded and cyber-physical systems, parallel/distributed/concurrent systems, probabilistic systems, and ubiquitous/pervasive software systems.
Submission Categories

We solicit submissions in two categories:

Technical Research Papers, which describe innovative research in automating software development or automating support to users engaged in software development activities. Papers in this category should:

clearly describe the extent to which the paper’s contributions can impact the field of software engineering and under which assumptions (if any);

articulate the novel contribution to the field and carefully support the claims of novelty with citations and discussions of the relevant literature;

show that the paper’s contributions and/or innovations address its research questions and are supported by rigorous application of appropriate research methods.

Experience Papers, which describe a significant experience in applying automated software engineering technology. Papers in this category should:

clearly describe a problem of practical importance, explain how the problem was investigated, and in what context;

present evidence for the paper’s conclusions, explaining the insights or best practices that emerged, tools developed, and/or software processes involved;

carefully identify and discuss important lessons learned, so that other researchers and/or practitioners can benefit from the experience.

Review Criteria

Each Technical Research paper will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

Significance. The extent to which the paper’s contributions can impact the field of software engineering in practice or in research, and under which assumptions (if any).

Novelty. The extent to which the contributions are sufficiently original with respect to the state-of-the-art.

Soundness. The extent to which the paper’s key claims are supported by rigorous application of appropriate research methods.

Each Experience paper will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

Importance and Scope. The extent to which the paper describes a problem of practical importance, explains how the problem was investigated, and in what context.

Insights and Evidence. The extent to which the paper’s conclusions are supported by evidence, and new insights, best practices, tools, or software processes are explained.

Perspective. The extent to which the paper identifies and discusses important lessons learned so that other researchers and/or practitioners can benefit from the experience

Additionally, the following criteria apply for both submission categories.

Verifiability. The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to understand how the evidence for key claims in the paper was produced, and how the paper supports independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions. Any artifacts attached to or linked from the paper may be checked by one reviewer.

Presentation. The extent to which the paper’s quality of writing meets the high standards of ASE, including clear descriptions, 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 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.

The outcome of each paper will be one of the following Accept, Revision, Reject.
Originality

Papers submitted to ASE 2026 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere when being considered for ASE 2026. Authors should be aware of the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ.

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. Contravention of the submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics and appropriate action will be taken in all such cases.
Double Anonymous Review Process

The ASE 2026 Research Track 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 and affiliated institution names must be omitted from the submission.

All references to the author’s prior work should be in the third person.

Authors are encouraged to title their submissions differently than preprints of the authors on arXiV or similar sites. During review, authors should not publicly use the submission title.

Artifact Availability and Supplementary Material

We actively support and encourage all contributing authors to disclose (anonymized and curated) data to increase reproducibility and replicability. Upon submission, authors are asked to make their data available to the program committee (via publication in a DOI-providing long-term repository such as Zenodo) or explain why this is not possible or desirable in the Data-Availability Statement. A Data-Availability Statement is mandatory for all ASE papers.

Supplementary material can be published anonymously before the paper submission and be referenced by its DOI. Please 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 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/

ACM Policy on Research Involving Humans

If work reported in the paper involves human subjects, authors will be required to affirm compliance with the ACM Policy on Research Involving Humans as part of the submission process:

https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/research-involving-human-participants-and-subjects

It is the authors’ responsibility (each author individually and the authors collectively) to comply with and provide evidence of compliance with this Policy. Where local ethical review boards are required, authors are responsible for having their research reviewed and approved by such boards. Authors are also responsible for the overall ethical conduct of their research. All ACM Authors must be prepared to provide documentary evidence to ACM that they have adhered to local ethical and legal standards, as ACM may require documentary evidence of such approval at any time following submission of the Work and prior to or after publication of the Work.
Open Access

https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/policy-on-geographic-apc-waivers-and-discounts

https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/policy-on-discretionary-open-access-apc-waivers

https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess

Formatting and Submission Guidelines

Abstracts and papers must be submitted electronically through the ASE 2026 HotCRP submission site: https://ase26.hotcrp.com/ All submissions must be in English.

For the abstract submissions, authors are required to specify the title and the abstract of their papers, relevant research areas, and their conflict of interests. This information will be used to select qualified reviewers for each submission. Authors are allowed to augment the paper title/abstract in the full paper submission stage. However, submissions with dummy placeholders for titles/abstracts will be rejected and authors of such submissions will be unable to proceed to the full paper submission stage.

All submissions must be in PDF format and conform, at time of submission, to the ACM Proceedings Template: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. LaTeX users must use the \documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart} option.

Submissions must not exceed 10 pages for the main text, including all figures, tables, appendices, etc. Up to two additional pages containing ONLY references are permitted. Submissions that do not adhere to these limits or that violate the formatting guidelines will be desk-rejected without review.

Experience papers should contain the phrase “experience paper” prominently in the abstract, to ensure that they are evaluated appropriately.

The authors are strongly encouraged to use the HotCRP format checker on their submissions. Note that the format checker is not perfect. In particular, it can complain about small fonts in figures, footnotes, or references. As long as the main text follows the requested format, and the figures are readable, the paper will not be rejected for format violations. If you have any concerns, please contact the program chairs.

The authors must follow the “[ACM Policy on Authorship]”(https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/new-acm-policy-on-authorship) released April 20, 2023 and its accompanying FAQ including the following point:

“Generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT, may not be listed as authors of an ACM published Work. The use of generative AI tools and technologies to create content is permitted but must be fully disclosed in the Work. For example, the authors could include the following statement in the Acknowledgements section of the Work: ChatGPT was utilized to generate sections of this Work, including text, tables, graphs, code, data, citations, etc. If you are uncertain ­about the need to disclose the use of a particular tool, err on the side of caution, and include a disclosure in the acknowledgements section of the Work.”

Please read the full policy and FAQ.
Accepted Papers

Accepted papers will be permitted an additional page of content to allow authors to incorporate review feedback. The page limit for published papers will therefore be 11 pages (including all figures, tables, appendices) plus 2 pages containing only references. Note that all submitted papers must conform to the 10+2 requirement, described above.

After acceptance, the list of paper authors cannot be changed under any circumstances. That is, the list of authors on camera-ready papers must be identical to those on submitted papers. Paper titles cannot be changed except by permission of the Track Chairs and only when referees recommend a change for clarity or accuracy with the paper content.

We strongly encourage authors of accepted papers to archive the research artifacts associated with their ASE papers, including code and data, in a repository with a DOI. Popular open-access repositories include but are not limited to, Figshare and Zenodo. The artifacts must be cited in the mandatory data-availability statement, if artifacts or data are not published, an explanation must be provided in the data-availability statement.

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for ASE 2026 and present the paper.
Important update on ACMs new open access publishing model for 2026 ACM Conferences!

Starting January 1, 2026, ACM will fully transition to Open Access. All ACM publications, including those from ACM-sponsored conferences, will be 100% Open Access. Authors will have two primary options for publishing Open Access articles with ACM: the ACM Open institutional model or by paying Article Processing Charges (APCs). With over 1,800 institutions already part of ACM Open, the majority of ACM-sponsored conference papers will not require APCs from authors or conferences (currently, around 70-75%).

Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to pay an APC to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a financial or discretionary waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the APC Waivers and Discounts Policy. Keep in mind that waivers are rare and are granted based on specific criteria set by ACM.

Understanding that this change could present financial challenges, ACM has approved a temporary subsidy for 2026 to ease the transition and allow more time for institutions to join ACM Open. The subsidy will offer:

$250 APC for ACM/SIG members

$350 for non-members

This represents a 65% discount, funded directly by ACM. Authors are encouraged to help advocate for their institutions to join ACM Open during this transition period.

This temporary subsidized pricing will apply to all conferences scheduled for 2026.
Publication Date

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.
Questions and Comments

If you have any further questions, please contact the PC chairs at j.petke@ucl.ac.uk and snejati@uottawa.ca .