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 ASE 2021 invites high quality contributions describing significant, original, and unpublished results.

Solicited topics include, but are not limited to:
Testing, verification, and validation
Software analysis
Empirical software engineering
Maintenance and evolution
Artificial intelligence for software engineering
Software engineering for artificial intelligence
Software security and trust; data privacy
Recommender systems for software engineering
Program synthesis & transformations, automated defect repair
Program comprehension
Mobile app development
Automated reasoning techniques
Software architecture and design
Reverse engineering and re-engineering
Model-driven development
Knowledge acquisition and management
Cloud computing
Human-computer interaction
Component-based service-oriented systems
Specification languages
Configuration management
Requirements engineering
Software product line engineering
Software visualization
Two categories of submissions are solicited:

Technical Research Papers should describe innovative research in automating software development activities or automated support to users engaged in such activities. They should describe a novel contribution to the field and should carefully support claims of novelty with citations to the relevant literature. Where a submission builds upon previous work of the author(s), the novelty of the new contribution must be clearly described with respect to the previous work, but the author identity should not be revealed, i.e., prior work should be referenced in the third person, to reflect the double-blind review policy. Papers should also clearly discuss how the results were validated

Experience Papers should describe a significant experience in applying automated software engineering technology and should carefully identify and discuss important lessons learned, so that other researchers and/or practitioners can benefit from the experience. Of special interest are experience papers that report on industrial applications of automated software engineering.

Like ASE 2020, New Ideas Papers will be managed and evaluated by a separate track (Short Paper track), with a separate PC, deadline, etc.

SUBMISSION
Abstracts and papers must be submitted electronically through the ASE 2021 HotCRP submission site.

Format. All submissions must be in English.

All submissions must be in PDF format and conform, at time of submission, to the ACM Proceedings Template (LaTEX users must use \documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart}).

Papers submitted to this track (Technical Research and Experience Papers) must not exceed 10 pages (including figures) plus up to 2 pages that contain ONLY references. Exceeding this limit will be grounds for rejection 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 at ase2021research@gmail.com.

Originality. Papers submitted to ASE 2021 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere when being considered for ASE 2021. 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, affiliated with ACM or IEEE, with overlapping review periods and (2) use external plagiarism detection software, under contract to the ACM or IEEE, to detect violations of these policies.

ASE 2021 will pursue a double-blind review process. If you have any questions, please see FAQs and/or contact the PC chairs at ase2021research@gmail.com. Authors are encouraged to double check conflicts of interest on their papers in HotCRP shortly after the submission deadline.

Submissions that do not adhere to these limits or that violate the formatting guidelines will be desk-rejected without 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 next). 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/

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 figures), plus 2 pages which may only contain references. Note that all submitted papers must conform to the 10+2 requirement, described above.

We strongly encourage authors of accepted papers to archive the research artifacts, including code and data, associated with their ASE papers. Software Heritage (presented in a keynote at ASE 2018) requires only providing a URL to an existing archive:

https://www.softwareheritage.org/2019/08/05/saving-and-referencing-research-software-in-software-heritage/

Other often used solutions, focusing on data, include Figshare and Zenodo.