Call for Papers 


The International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) is the principal venue for works in the area of program comprehension. Topics of interest for all tracks include but are not limited to:

  • Tool support for program comprehension;
  • Novel visualization techniques and interfaces to support program comprehension, including searching, browsing and analyzing;
  • Novel text summarisation techniques and interfaces to support program comprehension, including searching, browsing and analyzing;
  • Cognitive theories for program comprehension, including experiments, empirical studies, and case studies;
  • Individual, collaborative, distributed, and global program comprehension;
  • Comprehension of specific types of software systems, such as open/closed source, mobile applications, spreadsheets, web-based systems, legacy systems, product lines, libraries, multi-threaded applications, and systems of systems;
  • Comprehension in the context of diverse software process models and specific lifecycle activities, such as: maintenance, evolution, reengineering, migration, security, auditing, and testing;
  • Comprehension of software artifacts ranging from requirements documents to test cases and crash logs; from API documentation to models, meta-models and model transformation; and from Stack Overflow questions & answers to GitHub code review messages - all artifacts software developer encounters when creating or evolving software.
  • Empirical evaluations of program comprehension tools, techniques, and approaches;
  • Human aspects in program comprehension;
  • Comprehension and legal issues, such as due diligence, intellectual property, reverse engineering, and litigation;
  • Issues and case studies in the transfer of program comprehension technology to industry.

Technical Research Track


The research track of ICPC 2017 promises to provide a quality forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to present and to discuss state-of-the-art results and best practices in the field of program comprehension.

Format and Submission

Submissions must not be longer than 10 pages for the main text, inclusive of figures, tables, appendices; references only may be included on up to 2 additional pages. All papers must conform, at time of submission, to the IEEE Formatting Guidelines. All submissions must be in PDF format and must be submitted online via the ICPC 2017 EasyChair conference management system. All submissions must use the US Letter page format. See Paper Submission section for further details.

The best Technical Research Track papers at ICPC 2017 will be invited to be revised and extended for consideration in a special issue of the Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) journal by Springer.

Program Chairs

David Lo, Alexander Serebrenik

Program Committee
Dates
Abstract Submission:   January 18, 2017
Paper Submission:January 25, 2017
Author Notification:February 27, 2017
Camera Ready:March 29, 2017

Early Research Achievement Track


The goal of the Early Research Achievements (ERA) Track is to provide researchers and practitioners with a forum for presenting great, promising ideas in early stages of research. Ideally, ERA papers should be challenging the status quo of program comprehension with new research directions and provocative ideas. The ERA track is the perfect place for a paper that aims to set the agenda for a new line of research and a series of future papers.

The ERA track addresses the same topics of interest as those of the Technical Research Track. However, as opposed to regular research papers, ERA papers are intended to describe research in progress, even when a full-fledged evaluation of the research was not yet performed. Ideally, ERA authors will combine research topics in new ways, establish connections to other fields outside of classical program comprehension, as well as argue for the importance of program-comprehension research in new areas.

Format and Submission

Submissions should clearly focus on the new, proposed idea or emerging results, their impact on the field at large, and future research directions. An ERA paper is not expected to have a solid and complete evaluation as in the Technical Research Track. Naturally, preliminary results providing initial support for the proposed idea are welcome. Papers submitted to the ERA track must not have been previously accepted for publication or submitted for review to another conference, journal, or book. Submissions must be 4 pages long, including all text, references, appendices, and figures. All papers must conform, at time of submission, to the IEEE Formatting Guidelines. Submissions must be uploaded electronically in PDF format, through EasyChair. See Paper Submission section for further details.

Review and Evaluation Criteria

ERA papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the ERA Program Committee. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of their originality, importance of contribution, soundness, evaluation (if available), quality and consistency of presentation, and appropriate comparison to related work. Special emphasis will be put on the originality and timeliness of the proposed contribution, and even though an evaluation of the proposed idea is welcome, it is not required.

Publication and Presentation

Upon notification of acceptance, all authors of accepted papers will be asked to complete an IEEE Copyright form and will receive further instructions for preparing their camera-ready versions. At least one author of the paper must register and present the paper at the conference; otherwise the paper will be excluded from both the program and the proceedings. The papers will be presented in a formal setting. More details on the presentations will follow the notifications. All accepted papers will be published in the conference electronic proceedings, which will also be available in the IEEE Digital Library.

Track Chairs

Sonia Haiduc, Martin Pinzger

Program Committee
Dates
Abstract Submission:   March 1, 2017
Paper Submission:March 4, 2017
Author Notification:March 14, 2017
Camera Ready:March 29, 2017

Industry Track


Comprehension at Scale

For the brave souls that strive to comprehend code in the real world: this is your track. Tell us your tales of using a SeeSoft-like view to comprehend 1MLOC of COBOL banking code, of using a MineCraft world to explore a client’s CodeCity, or of observing your team struggle to understand an adopted codebase. From your experiences we look forward to learning what research works in practice (and what does not) and perhaps even gaining insight into real world problems that are relevant but overlooked.

Recommended Themes

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:

This is a paper where you describe unsolved problems from industry that you think should be researched, and is probably best as 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:

This type of paper describes taking a research method and applying it in practice. It describes why the method was chosen, 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:

This type of paper describes an evolution/maintenance project. There does not have to be new invention in the paper. Hint: if you are a practitioner, most likely this is your category! Examples: Migrating Legacy Control Software to Multi-core Hardware (ICSME '15, PDF), Reverse Engineering PL/SQL Legacy Code: An Experience Report (ICSME '14), Using Static Analysis for Knowledge Extraction from Industrial User Interfaces (ICSME '15)

Recommended Team Composition

The Industry Track values both realism AND scientific rigor, and thus requires deep expertise in both areas. Because of this, we recommend that teams include both academic and industrial members. Many industry-only papers fail due to poor writing and lack of scientific rigor and many academic-only papers fail due to lack of realism.

Evaluation

Key reviewing criteria are listed below. Note that not all criteria are appropriate for every submission — e.g., improvement on the state-of-the-practice may be irrelevant for an experience report — and that we will adjust criteria to fit the given type of submission.

Relevance to ICPC audience

The core concepts of the work either originate in research, either at ICPC or a related conference, or are novel ICPC -appropriate topics.

Improvement on the state-of-the-practice

The amount of improvement that the work achieves above and beyond the state-of-the-practice.

Impact of tech transfer activity

The scale of the impact (e.g., individual vs team vs several teams) of the tech transfer work (only relevant for tech transfer activities).

Generality of results

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

All papers and proposals must be submitted electronically through the online submission site, EasyChair. Submissions may be up to 10 pages in length (including figures, tables, appendices, figures, and references) and must be conform, at time of submission, to the IEEE Formatting Guidelines. Accepted papers will be included in the ICPC 2017 Companion Proceedings. See Paper Submission section for further details.

Proceedings publication date:

 The official publication date of the ICPC 2017 Companion Proceedings is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Track Chairs

Felienne Hermans, David Shepherd

Program Committee
Dates
Abstract Submission:   February 18, 2017
Paper Submission:February 25 February 26, 2017
Author Notification:March 14, 2017
Camera Ready:March 29, 2017

Tool Demo Track


We invite you to submit Tool Demo papers to the 2017 ICPC Demo Track. Tool Demo proposals can consist of either academic prototypes or industry-oriented tools. We encourage submissions of demo papers that implement a research approach, a prototype, or a mature product ready for deployment. Tool Demos provide a great opportunity to promote your tools and lively discuss and receive feedback from experts in the field. We are interested in tools related to any topic relevant to the ICPC community. Please consider to look at the topics of interest of ICPC 2017.

Format and Submission

This year we are accepting demo proposals consisting of 4 pages (including figures, tables, appendices, and references). Papers must conform, at time of submission, to the IEEE Formatting Guidelines and must be submitted electronically through EasyChair. Your 4-page paper must be accompanied by a 3-to-5 minute screencast. You can use either annotations or voice-over in your 3-to-5 minute screencast, which you will need to post on YouTube (private, not shared). Optionally, authors can create a tool Web page. In this case, they should include a working link to the tool Web page in the paper. See Paper Submission section for further details.

Review and Evaluation Criteria

Each submission will be reviewed by the tool demo program committee (at least three members). The committee will evaluate each submission based on the following review criteria:

  • Relevance to the ICPC 2017 topics of interests
  • Novelty of the tool
  • Related works and tool
  • Motivational scenario as shown in the screencast
  • Experiments or case studies making use of the tool (if any)
Track Chairs

Latifa Guerrouj, Simone Romano

Program Committee
Dates
Abstract Submission:   March 1, 2017
Paper Submission:March 4, 2017
Author Notification:March 14, 2017
Camera Ready:March 29, 2017

Paper Submission


All papers must conform, at time of submission, to the IEEE Formatting Guidelines. All submissions must be in PDF format and must be submitted online via the ICPC 2017 EasyChair conference management system. All submissions must use the US Letter page format. Papers must not have been previously accepted for publication nor concurrently submitted for review in another journal, book, conference, or workshop. All accepted papers will be published in the conference electronic proceedings, and will also be available in a digital library. At least one author of the paper must register and present the paper/demo at the conference; otherwise the paper will be excluded from both the program and the proceedings. Purchases of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.

Starting from the 2017 edition all tracks of ICPC will adhere to a triple blind review policy. A triple blind review policy requires blinding the reviewers from the authors (single), blinding the authors from the reviewers (double), and blinding the reviewers from the other reviewers (triple). This means that the submissions should by no means disclose the identity of the authors. In particular, this means that the following rules should be observed (quoted from and extending the Elsevier policy):

  • Use the third person to refer to work the Authors have previously undertaken, e.g., replace any phrases like "as we have shown before" with "... has been shown before [Anonymous, 2007]".
  • Do not eliminate essential self-references or other references but limit self-references only to papers that are relevant for those reviewing the submitted paper.
  • Cite papers published by the Author in the text as follows: "[Anonymous, 2007]". For blinding in the reference list: "[Anonymous 2007] Details omitted for double-blind reviewing."
  • Remove references to funding sources or industrial collaborations. Do not include acknowledgments.
  • Name your files with care and ensure document properties are also anonymized. If appendices, data or tools are made available on-line for the purpose of replication ensure that these files are anonymized as well, and that the choice of the storage website cannot leak the authors' identities.

During the submission process the authors will be requested to provide their names and contact details: this information will be visible only to the PC chairs and will not be made visible to PC members. Furthermore, the authors will be requested to indicate the names of the PC members having conflict of interests with them. As specified in the ICPC Guidelines on Conference Submissions the following situations constitute a conflict of interests:

  • Affiliation with the same institution within 4 years (anywhere in your organization or parent company counts). Note that this includes your previous institution if you have recently changed jobs, and your future institution if you are in the process of changing jobs.
  • Co-author, pending co-author, or submitted co-author of a publication within 4 years, in any technical area, including patents, technical reports, etc.
  • Other relationships that can be viewed as conflict of interest (e.g., PhD advisor/family members/etc.).

All authors, reviewers, chairs and participants are expected to uphold the IEEE Code of Conduct.

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE2017. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Submissions close at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12).