Research PapersESEC/FSE 2021

Call for Papers
We invite high-quality submissions, from both industry and academia, describing original and unpublished results of theoretical, empirical, conceptual, and experimental software engineering research. Contributions should describe innovative and significant original research. Papers describing groundbreaking approaches to emerging problems will also be considered. Submissions that facilitate reproducibility by using available datasets or making the described tools and datasets publicly available are especially encouraged. For a list of specific topics of interest, please see the end of this call. Papers submitted for consideration to ESEC/FSE should not have been already published elsewhere and should not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere during the reviewing period. Specifically, authors are required to adhere to the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the ACM Policy on Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submissions.

How to Submit
At the time of submission, all papers must conform to the ESEC/FSE 2021 Format and Submission Guidelines, and must not exceed 10 pages for all text and figures plus 2 pages for references. All submissions must be in English and in PDF format. You can submit, optionally, an additional file containing supplementary material (see details below). Submissions that do not comply with the above instructions will be desk rejected without review. Papers must be submitted electronically through the ESEC/FSE submission site:

https://esecfse2021.hotcrp.com

Each submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. Authors will have an opportunity to respond to reviews during a rebuttal period. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of originality, importance of contribution, soundness, evaluation, quality of presentation and appropriate comparison to related work. The program committee as a whole will make final decisions about which submissions to accept for presentation at the conference. ESEC/FSE 2020 will employ a double-blind review process. The papers submitted must not reveal the authors’ identities in any way:

Authors should leave out author names and affiliations from the body of their submission.
Authors should ensure that any citation to related work by themselves is written in third person, that is, “the prior work of XYZ” as opposed to “our prior work”.
Authors should not include URLs to author-revealing sites (tools, datasets).
You are encouraged to submit a link to a Web site or repository containing supplementary material (raw data, datasets, experiments, etc.), as long as it is blinded. The visit of such sites should not be needed to conduct the review. The program committee will not necessarily consider it in the paper review process. For more information, please read How to disclose data for double-blind review and make it archived open data upon acceptance. As an alternative to having an external link, the submission form provides an option to attach a replication package.
Authors should anonymize author-revealing company names but instead provide general characteristics of the organizations involved needed to understand the context of the paper.
Authors should ensure that paper acknowledgements do not reveal the origin of their work.
The double-blind process used this year is “heavy”, i.e., the paper anonymity will be maintained during the reviewers’ discussion period and the authors’ rebuttal period. Authors must therefore maintain the anonymity in their responses during the rebuttal phase, and provide no additional information that would otherwise be author-revealing.

Authors with further questions on double-blind reviewing are encouraged to contact the program chairs by email. Papers that do not comply with the double-blind review process will be desk-rejected.

To prevent double submissions, the chairs will compare the submissions with related conferences that have overlapping review periods. The double submission restriction applies only to refereed journals and conferences, not to unrefereed forums (e.g. arXiv.org). To check for plagiarism issues, the chairs will use external plagiarism detection software.

That being said, we request that the authors postpone publishing your submitted work on Arxiv or similar sites until after the notification of acceptance, to comply with the double-blind reviewing process. If the authors have compelling reasons to nevertheless publish a preprint earlier, this publication cannot take place in the two weeks before or after the ESEC/FSE submission deadline. If the program chairs get the impression that the authors frivolously share papers and do not live up to the spirit of the double-blind reviewing process, the program chairs can decide to (desk) reject the paper.

All publications are subject to the ACM Author Representations policy.

Important Dates
All dates are 23:59:59 AoE (UTC-12h).

Full paper submission: February 25, 2021
Rebuttal period (all papers): April 27-30, 2021
Discussion phase: May 1-15, 2021
Additional short response period (selected papers): May 10-12, 2021
Author notification: May 21, 2021
Camera ready: TBA
Open Science Policy
The research track of ESEC/FSE has introduced an open science policy. Openness in science is key to fostering scientific progress via transparency, reproducibility, and replicability. 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.

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 a private or public repository) or to comment on why this is not possible or desirable. While sharing such a repository is not mandatory for submission or acceptance, this information will be passed to the program committee to inform its decision. Furthermore, authors are asked to indicate whether they intend to make their data publicly available upon acceptance. For more details on ESEC/FSE open science policy, please refer to the official guidelines.

Authors of accepted papers will be given an opportunity (and encouragement) to submit their data and tools to the separate ESEC/FSE’21 artifact evaluation committee.

Topics of Interest
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Artificial intelligence and machine learning for software engineering
Autonomic computing
Debugging and fault localization
Dependability, safety, and reliability
Distributed and collaborative software engineering
Embedded software, safety-critical systems, and cyber-physical systems
Empirical software engineering
Human-computer interaction
Mining software repositories
Mobile development
Model checking
Model-driven engineering
Parallel, distributed, and concurrent systems
Performance engineering
Program analysis
Program comprehension
Program repair
Program synthesis
Programming languages
Recommendation systems
Requirements engineering
Search based software engineering
Services, components, and cloud
Software architectures
Software engineering education
Software engineering for machine learning and artificial intelligence
Software evolution
Software processes
Software security
Software testing
Software traceability
Symbolic execution
Tools and environments