Call for Industrial Track Papers
Overview
ESEC/FSE is widely known for its high-quality research papers in all areas of software engineering. Its industry track focuses on the same topics and values the same rigor as its research track, yet papers featured in the industrial track are distinct. What sets the industrial track apart is that it values impact and realism over novelty. We expect that findings from industrial track publications have the potential to impact practice in the 0-2 year range.
Important dates
- Deadline for Industrial Track papers submission: May 12, 2017
- Notification of acceptance: June 16, 2017
- Camera-ready paper due: July 3, 2017
How to submit
Papers must be submitted electronically through:
the industry track submission site https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=esecfseindustrytrack
Recommended Themes
In the industrial track, while this is a non-exhaustive list, most papers fall into one of the three following categories:
- New Research Challenge: This is a paper where you describe unsolved problems from industry that you think should be researched. Example: Is This Code Written in English? A Study of the Natural Language of Comments and Identifiers in Practice
- 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
- 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! Example: Migrating Legacy Control Software to Multi-core Hardware
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 industrial track audience - The core concepts of the work either originate in research, either at ESEC/FSE or a related conference, or are novel ESEC/FSE-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 - While we intentionally do not limit submissions to certain categories, we do encourage potential authors to view the FSE Industrial Track 2016 list of papers for examples of appropriate submissions.
Recommended Team Composition
While teams of all makeups are encouraged to submit to the industrial track, successful teams in the past have followed a pattern. That pattern is to pair experienced practitioners with academics. While it is conjecture as to why this team makeup is so effective, the industrial track’s values of realism AND scientific rigor requires deep expertise in both areas. Simply put; many industry-only papers fail due to poor writing and scientific rigor and many academic-only papers fail due to lack of realism.
Format and submission procedure
All papers must conform to the ACM Conference Format, and must be between 4 and 6 pages. All submissions must be in English. Submissions must be in PDF format. Papers must be submitted electronically through the ESEC/FSE submission site (a link will be provided later on). Papers submitted for consideration should not have been published elsewhere and should not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere during the duration of consideration. ACM plagiarism policies and procedures shall be followed for cases of double submission. Submissions that do not comply with the foregoing instructions will be desk rejected without being reviewed.
Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the Program Committee. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of practical relevance, soundness, quality of presentation, and appropriate comparison to related work.
Presentation and publication
Authors of accepted submissions will be given a 25-minute time slot to present or demonstrate their work. Accepted industry track papers will be allocated 4 (or 6) pages in the main conference proceedings. At least one author of each accepted paper must register and attend ESEC/FSE 2017 in order for the paper to be published in the proceedings.
Industrial Track Chairs
- Gregor Engels, Paderborn University
- David Shepherd, ABB Corporate Research
Program Committee
- Dongmei Zhang, Microsoft Research
- Marija Mikic, Google Inc
- Heiko Koziolek, ABB Corporate Research
- Dr. Perdita Löhr, arvato CRM IT QAM
- Markus Voelter, Independent
- Lucas Layman, Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering
- Nicholas A. Kraft, ABB Corporate Research
- Jochen Quante, Robert Bosch GmbH
- Audris Mockus, The University of Tennessee
- Forrest Shull, Carnegie Mellon University / Software Engineering Institute
- Matt Staats, Google
- Roger Kilian-Kehr, Messer Cutting Systems
- Kristin Yvonne Rozier, Iowa State University
- Magiel Bruntink, Software Improvement Group