# Call for Papers International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE)

Bots (short for software robots) are software applications that perform often repetitive or simple tasks. In particular, social and chat bots interacting with humans are a recent research topic. Similarly, bots can be used to automate many tasks that are performed by software practitioners and teams in their day-to-day work. Recent work argue that bots can save developers' time and significantly increase productivity. Therefore, the goal of this one-day workshop is to bring together software engineering researchers and practitioners to discuss the opportunities and challenges of bots in software engineering. We solicit 4-page work in progress papers, position papers, and experience reports. Work in progress papers are expected to describe new research results and make contributions to the body knowledge in the area. Position papers are expected to discuss controversial issues in the field, or describe interesting or thought provoking ideas that are not yet fully developed. Experience reports are expected to describe experiences with (amongst other things) the development, deployment, and maintenance of bot-based systems in the software engineering domain. All submissions will be reviewed by at least three program committee members. Accepted submissions will be invited to give a talk to present their findings. Submissions may address issues along the general themes, including but not limited, to the following topics:

- Using bots to derive software requirements and documentation
- Using bots in the context of the reliability, quality, safety, security, privacy and trustworthiness of software systems
- Using bots to support software continuous integration, deployment and delivery
- Using bots to enhance and support software testing & maintenance
- Supporting and answering developer questions using bots
- Issues related to the use of, or research on, SE bots (e.g. privacy, ethical, human-computer interaction)
- Practical experiences in developing bots
- Experiences on using bot frameworks in software systems

# Important Dates

- Submission Deadline: 14 January 2022
- Acceptance Notification: 25 February 2022
- Camera Ready: 18 March 2022

# How to Submit (adapted from ICSE)

Submissions should be made via easychair by the submission deadline.

Submission must not exceed 4 pages, including all text, figures, tables, and appendices; one additional page containing only references is permitted. Submissions must conform to the 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 option).

The submission must also comply with the ACM plagiarism policy and procedures. In particular, submissions must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review elsewhere. The submission must also comply with the IEEE Policy on Authorship.

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to attend the workshop and present the paper in person. All accepted workshop papers will be published in the proceedings by IEEE CS.

# Proposal for lightning talks

In addition to the paper submissions, we also solicit presentation-only lightning talks.
Talk proposals should not exceed 300 words and need to be submitted via easychair by the submission deadline.

# Organization

## Steering Committee

- Stefan Wagner - University of Stuttgart
- Marco A. Gerosa - Northern Arizona University
- Emad Shihab - Concordia University

## Organizing Committee

- Stefan Wagner - University of Stuttgart
- Mairieli Wessel - Delft University of Technology
- Tom Mens - University of Mons

## Web Chair

- Ahmad Abdellatif - Concordia University

## Publicity Chair

- Mehdi Golzadeh - University of Mons

## Program Committee

- Ahmad Abdellatif, Concordia University, Canada
- Shivali Agarwal, IBM, India Research Lab
- Chris Brown, Virginia Tech, USA
- Jordi Cabot, Open University of Catalonia, Spain
- Eleni Constantinou, TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands
- Linda Erlenhov, Chalmers University, Sweden
- Claudio Pinhanez, IBM Research, Brazil
- Esteban Parra Rodriguez, Florida State University, USA
- Alexander Serebrenik, TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands
- Bogdan Vasilescu, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
- Marvin Wyrich, University of Stuttgart, Germany