Industry Track - Call for Papers
(Virtual Event)
Goal and Scope
The industry track brings together participants from academia and industry in a venue that highlights practical and real-world studies of software maintenance and evolution. This track aims to foster mutually-beneficial links between those engaged in scientific research and practitioners working to improve software maintenance and evolution practices. Experiences from practitioners provide crucial input into future research directions and allow others to learn from successes and failures.
The ICSME 2021 industry track highlights practical and real-world studies of software maintenance and evolution. Submissions to this track should address:
- Real-world success and/or failure stories and evidences evolving and maintaining systems
- Experiences and lessons applying state-of-the-art methods, techniques and tools to industrial software evolution and maintenance problems
- New and unsolved challenges derived from practical problems
We are interested in results, obstacles, and lessons learned. If you apply in an industrial context a method, technique, or tool that was previously presented at ICSME or another software engineering conference, we greatly encourage you to submit to this track. In addition, machine learning models now become essential to an intelligent software system. Papers reporting experiences and tools on the maintenance and evolution of machine learning models in a software system are also welcomed.
Submission Types
We invite submissions of state-of-the-art practice and experience reports, survey reports from real-world projects and industrial experiences, and evidence-based identification of unsolved research challenges associated with software maintenance and evolution. Each submission should describe the problem addressed, the approach used, the current state of the project, an evaluation of the benefits or lessons learned, and future developments. Submissions may be extended abstracts (1 page), short papers (4 pages) or long papers (10 pages).
- Extended abstracts (1 page) may address:
- Important industry needs that are not adequately addressed in the research community
- Ways to improve communication between the research and practitioner communities
- Ways to make research papers more accessible to industry
- New and unsolved research challenges derived from practical problems
- Success stories reporting benefits and lessons learned
- Failure stories reporting obstacles and lessons learned
- Short papers (4 pages) may address:
- New and unsolved research challenges derived from practical problems
- Success stories reporting benefits and lessons learned
- Failure stories reporting obstacles and lessons learned
- State-of-the-practice and experience reports with empirical evidence
- State-of-the-practice surveys reports from real-world projects
- Application reports about methods, techniques, and tools
- Long papers (10 pages) may include:
- State-of-the-practice and experience reports with empirical evidences
- State-of-the-practice surveys reports from real-world projects
- In-depth application reports about methods, techniques, and tools
We welcome submissions that are mainly driven by practitioners as much as submissions that are mainly driven by researchers!
- Researcher-driven submissions:
A paper is considered researcher-driven if the main author(s) are researchers (the paper can have industrial co-authors). Researcher-driven submissions to the industry track should be distinguished from research track submissions by richness in industrial data or their focus on industrial cases.
- Practitioner-driven submissions:
A paper is considered practitioner-driven if the main author(s) are practitioners (the paper can have co-authors from academia). These papers may focus more on specific cases or applications and do not require the same degree of generalizability as researcher-driven submissions.
Reviews
Submissions will be reviewed by at least three members of the industry track program committee. The committee consists of 50-70% of practitioners or industrial researchers, who have a good understanding of the value of industry contributions. The evaluation serves the purpose to ensure the quality of the submissions and provide constructive feedback. Papers that successfully pass the review process will be accepted for presentation and publication. The type of the paper (researcher-driven or practitioner-driven) will be considered during the review. The below criteria will be considered by the reviewers:
- Relevance to ICSME audience
The core concepts of the work either originate in research, either at ICSME or a related conference, or are novel ICSME-appropriate topics.
- Improvement on the state-of-the-practice or state-of-knowledge
The amount of improvement that the work achieves above and beyond the state-of-the-practice (demonstrated with evidence from practice) or the scale of the impact (e.g., individual vs team vs several teams) of the tech transfer work demonstrated with evidence from practice. Extended Abstract papers should indeed cover a practical problem that practitioners are facing and that our research community might either not be aware of, or where our research hasn't trickled down into a usable (or known) tool so that practitioners can use it.
- Generality of results (researcher-driven papers)
The probability that the work, approach, or lessons learned are applicable to developers outside of the studied group.
- Clarity of lessons learned
The clarity in which the lessons learned are presented and how well they are supported with data and discussion.
- Overall quality of the manuscript
Submissions that are not in compliance with the required submission format or that are out of the scope of the conference will be rejected without being reviewed. Submitted papers must comply with IEEE plagiarism policy and procedures. Papers submitted to the industry track must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere while under consideration for ICSME 2021.
Publication and Presentation
Accepted papers will be published in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. Please review the ICSME 2021 Publication Requirements for more details. Presentation details will follow notifications of acceptance.
How to Submit
For 2021, we will follow a single-blind review process (i.e., reviewers can visualize author names and affiliations). A single-blind review process should enable authors to fully describe their context and case studies, which are core in industry-track papers. Submitted papers must adhere to the following rules:
- Author names and affiliations should appear on the paper.
- References to authors' own related work should be made explicit.
Submissions must strictly adhere to the two-column IEEE conference proceedings format. You can find the templates here. LaTeX users should use the following configuration: \documentclass[conference]{IEEEtran}. Microsoft Word users should use the US Letter format template. Papers must not exceed 1 page (for extended abstracts), 4 pages (for short papers) or 10 pages (for long papers), including all text, references, figures, and appendices. All submissions must be in PDF and must be submitted online by the deadline via the ICSME 2021 EasyChair conference management system (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icsme2021); authors should choose "ICSME 2021 Industry Track Papers". All authors, reviewers, organizers are expected to uphold the IEEE Code of Conduct.
Important Dates
**All submission dates are at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12)**
Full / Short papers
- Abstract Submission: Wednesday, May 26, 2021
- Paper Submission: Sunday, May 30, 2021
- Author Notification: Thursday, July 15, 2021
- Camera-ready Submission: Sunday, August 15, 2021
Extended Abstracts
- Paper Submission: Friday, June 18, 2021
- Author Notification: Thursday, July 15, 2021
- Camera-ready Submission: Sunday, August 15, 2021
Track Chairs
Alessandra Gorla (alessandra.gorla@imdea.org), IMDEA Software Institute, Spain
Fabrizio Pastore (fabrizio.pastore@uni.lu), University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg