This year, I am chairing the ‘industry track’ of ICSME: the international conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, and you, yes you can be a part of this. In the regular, research, track, we are looking for paper that have made a novel contribution, for example a new algorithm to detect duplication in source code. In the industry track however, we are looking for papers that have used an existing method for maintenance or evolution in a real life setting. So if you have recently migrated a code base from COBOL to node.js, ran some clone detection on your code or tried experimental refactoring tools, we would love to hear about it.

If you’d like to get a feel for what papers are accepted, check the proceedings of last year and the year before. Most of the papers have free ‘preprints’ available, for the others you can always try to Google a title, or send a tweet with #canIhazpdf.

We are looking for both 4 and 10 page papers, and there are more or less three types of papers that could be accepted:

• New Research Challenge encountered in Daily Work
  • This is a paper where you describe unsolved problems from industry that you think should be
  • Probably most suited in the form of a 4 page paper.
  • Example: Is This Code Written in English? A Study of the Natural Language of Comments and Identifiers in Practice (ICSME ’15, PDF)
• Tech Transfer:
  • In this case, you took a research method published in software maintenance literature and applied it in practice.
  • You describe why you choose this method, what the problem was and how it was solved
  • Example: Code Smells in Spreadsheet Formulas Revisited on an Industrial Dataset (ICSME ’15, PDF)
• Experience reports/Case Studies
  • In this type of paper you describe an evolution/maintenance project you did
  • There does not have to be new invention in the paper
  • Hint: if you are a practitioner, most likely this is your category!
  • Example: Migrating Legacy Control Software to Multi-core Hardware (ICSME ’15, PDF)
  • Another example: Reverse Engineering PL/SQL Legacy Code: An Experience Report (ICSME ’14)
  • Another example: Using Static Analysis for Knowledge Extraction from Industrial User Interfaces (ICSME ’15)

All papers are judged by at least 2 reviewers from the Industry Track Program Committee. As you can see on the website, many of them are not scientist, but people from the industry, mixed with researchers doing really applied work. So you do not have to worry that much about papers being rejected for not being “scientific” We want to hear real experiences.

Generally, the committee judges papers based on these criteria

• Relevance to ICSME audience -> Is this a topic of Maintenance and Evolution?
• Improvement on the state-of-the-practice -> Have you done something no one has done before?
• Impact of tech transfer activity -> Did many people profit from your method?*
• Generality of results -> Is this useful to lots of other people?
• Clarity of lessons learned -> Do we understand what you learned?
• Overall quality of the manuscript -> Are there no typos and is the story clear?

If you have an idea for a paper, but do not know if it is suitable? Share it in the comments or email Jens or me.

If you’re all good, send us your 4 or a 10 page paper by June 24th, and maybe you get to present. If you would like to hear about latest research and solutions to industrial challenges, attend ICSME from October 2-10 and meet us in Raleigh, the capital of beer and BBQ, according to locals.

Looking forward to hear from you!

* This specifically applies to ‘tech transfer’ papers