Call for Papers
The International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) is the premier venue for work in the area of software program comprehension. It encompasses both human activities for comprehending the software and technologies for supporting such comprehension.

The research track provides a quality forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to present and discuss new results in program comprehension. Topics of interest for all tracks include but are not limited to:

Tool support for program comprehension;
Novel visualization techniques and interfaces to support program comprehension, including searching, browsing and analyzing;
Novel text summarisation techniques and interfaces to support program comprehension, including searching, browsing and analyzing;
Cognitive theories for program comprehension, including experiments, empirical studies, and case studies;
Collaborative software engineering practices for program comprehension;
Individual, collaborative, distributed, and global program comprehension;
Comprehension of specific types of software systems, such as open/closed source, mobile applications, spreadsheets, web-based systems, legacy systems, product lines, libraries, multi-threaded applications, and systems of systems;
Comprehension in the context of diverse software process models and specific lifecycle activities, such as: maintenance, evolution, re-engineering, migration, security, auditing, and testing;
Comprehension of software artifacts ranging from requirements documents to test cases and crash logs; from API documentation to models, meta-models and model transformation; and from Stack Overflow questions & answers to GitHub code review messages - all artifacts software developer encounters when creating or evolving software.
Empirical evaluations of program comprehension tools, techniques, and approaches;
Human aspects in program comprehension;
Comprehension and legal issues, such as due diligence, intellectual property, reverse engineering, and litigation;
Issues and case studies in the transfer of program comprehension technology to industry.
Technical Research Track papers accepted for presentation at ICPC 2021 will be invited to be revised and extended for consideration in a top journal in the field of software engineering.

Format and Submission
Submissions must not be longer than 10 pages for the main text, inclusive of figures, tables, appendices. References only may be included on up to 2 additional pages. Purchases of additional pages in the proceedings are not allowed.

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).

The submissions must comply with the ACM Policy on Plagiarism, Misrepresentation, and Falsification. In particular, they must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review elsewhere while under review for ICPC. The submission must also comply with the IEEE Policy on Authorship, part of the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ.

Submissions should not disclose the identity of the authors to comply with the double-blind review process employed by ICPC. The authors’ names must be omitted from the submissions and references to their prior work should be in the third person. Further advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-blind review process are available on the Q & A of ICSE 2021.

ICPC 2021 follows the ACM SIGSOFT rules on Conflicts of Interest and Confidentiality of Submissions and all authors, reviewers, and organizers will uphold the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

By submitting to the ICPC, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM, and the authorship policy of the IEEE.

Submissions to the Research Track that meet the above requirements can be made via the Technical Track submission site (https://www.easychair.org/my/conference?conf=icpc2021) by the submission deadline. We encourage the authors to upload their paper information 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 EasyChair 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/.

Review and Evaluation Criteria
Research papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee. Submissions 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 standards of ICPC, including clear descriptions and explanations, appropriate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and adherence to the formatting instructions provided below.
Publication and Presentation
Upon notification of acceptance, all authors of accepted papers will receive further instructions for preparing the camera-ready versions of their submissions. If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for ICPC 2021 and present the paper. All accepted papers will be published in the conference electronic proceedings, which will also be available in the IEEEXplore Library. 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). Details about the presentations will follow the notifications.

Program Co-chairs
Fabio Palomba and Anita Sarma