Technical PapersTechDebt 2023

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

We invite submissions of papers to the Technical Track in any areas related to the theme and goal of the conference in the following categories:

• Research Papers (up to 10 pages): innovative and significant original research in the field
• Experience Papers (up to 10 pages): experience, case studies, challenges, problems, and solutions drawn from the application of technical debt tools and techniques in the industrial context.

If you would like to submit a tool demo or description of a tool (either to complement your submission to the Technical Track or as a separate submission), or early research achievements, please refer to the Short Paper Track of TechDebt 2023.

Submissions must be original and unpublished work. Each paper submitted to the main Technical Track will undergo a rigorous review process by at least three members of the program committee.

TechDebt 2023 is using a doubly anonymous reviewing model for the Technical Track (only). Therefore, all submissions to this track have to fulfill the doubly-anonymous reviewing requirements (refer to the ICSE Q&A for more details). Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk-rejected without further review.

Evaluation criteria:

• Relevance: Submission must respond to Call for Papers.
• Novelty: Is there sufficient originality in the contribution, and is it clearly and correctly explained with respect to the state of the art?
• Soundness: Are all claimed contributions supported by the rigorous application of appropriate research methods? Claims should be scoped to what can be supported, and limitations should be discussed.
• Significance: Are contributions evaluated for their importance and impact with respect to the existing body of knowledge? The authors are expected to explicitly argue for the relevance and usefulness of the research and discuss the novelty of the claimed contributions through a comparison with pertinent related work.
• Replicability: Is there sufficient information in the paper for the results to be independently replicated? The evaluation of submissions will take into account the extent to which sufficient information is available to support the full or partial independent replication of the claimed findings.
• Presentation Quality: Are results clearly presented? Submissions are expected to meet high standards of presentation, including adequate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and respect of the formatting instructions.

The weighting and relevance of the above criteria vary for paper types.

Openness in science is key to fostering progress via transparency, reproducibility and replicability. While all submissions will undergo the same review process independent of whether or not they disclose their analysis code or data, we strongly encourage authors to make data available upon submission (either privately or publicly) and especially upon acceptance (publicly). If the authors cannot disclose industrial or otherwise non-public data, they should provide an explicit (short) statement in the paper.

Papers must be submitted electronically via the TechDebtConf2023 HotCRP site. Submissions must be in PDF and conform to the IEEE formatting guidelines applied for ICSE 2023. Submissions may not exceed the number of pages specified above (including all text, references, and figures). Purchase of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.

Formatting instructions are available for both LaTeX and Word users at: https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html ((title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options).

Submissions are via HotCRP: https://techdebt2023.hotcrp.com/

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM or IEEE Digital Libraries. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of TechDebt 2023. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

A selection of the best papers will be invited to submit extended versions for tentative publication in a Special Section of the journal of Empirical Software Engineering published by Springer. The best papers of the research track will be awarded an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at TechDebt 2023.