Doctoral TrackICSSP/ICGSE 2021

The Doctoral Track of the ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 conference solicits novel, high quality research proposals from Ph.D. students focusing on a wide range of topics related to global software engineering and software processes. The Doctoral Track will be hosted as an integral part of the ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 program. Topics of interest are the same as for the Main track of ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 and also more generally, all research areas that are in scope of the past ICSSP and ICGSE conferences series.

The goal of the ICSSP and ICGSE communities in hosting the Doctoral Track is driven by a keen appreciation of the importance of Doctoral studies and the many benefits that expert community-led constructive feedback can deliver in terms of enhancing Doctoral work, while also supporting leading researchers of the future. Thus, the Track offers a rare opportunity to obtain valuable expert feedback and to get in touch with peer students in the same field of interest. The event is designed with 1st/2nd year PhD candidates in mind, and particularly where initial results are not yet mature enough for a full conference paper and the work going forward may benefit from feedback from the ICSSP and ICGSE communities.

Attendance

Authors of submissions selected for acceptance will have the opportunity to present their work during the Doctoral Track to ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 audience. As such, it offers an excellent opportunity for current Ph.D. candidates to present their work and elicit feedback from the community, which is composed of some of the leading figures in the software process and global software engineering domains.

The camera-ready version of the accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and the ACM/IEEE Digital Libraries. The publication requires the author to:

1. submit a proposal and attach an informal letter from your supervisor stating his/her support for the submission and participation (i.e., funding for the registration, travel, etc.). Letters of recommendation must also be submitted through the submission site on EasyChair prior to the submission deadline. Submissions without a supporting letter of recommendation will not be reviewed;

2. register to the ICSSP/ICGSE conference;

3. participate in the Doctoral Track;

4. present your paper and research in the Doctoral Track session.

Selected students will receive feedback both from a panel of experts, the present audience, and other Doctoral students. The students will also have the opportunity to seek advice on various aspects of completing a Ph.D. and performing research in software engineering.

Submissions

Doctoral Track papers shall present research progress to date, current work-in-progress and plan to completion. Research proposals submitted to the Doctoral Track should be a maximum of 4 pages, including references and figures, and should be formatted using the same submission template stipulated for the main conference papers. Papers not adhering to this page length requirement will not be admitted to the review process. Research proposals will be subjected to a single-blind review.

Each submission must include:

● Title

● Researcher’s name (as single author) and affiliation

● Supervisor(s) name(s) included in acknowledgements

● Abstract (no more than 150 words)

● List of keywords

● Research proposal (see more details below)

● A complete list of references

The proposal should be presented in a structured manner at least comprising the following parts:

1. Motivation: describe the problem that you want to address and briefly summarize existing approaches along with their deficiencies.

2. Objectives: outline the key objectives of your PhD research and argue how achieving them will address the problem outlined in the motivation.

3. Methodology: identify what methodology you will adapt to meet the objectives of your project. Clearly state on what existing works your work will build.

4. Research challenges: outline the technical, methodological, conceptual, or other hurdles faced in completing the research.

5. Research Plan: describe what preliminary results – if any – you have already achieved and summarize your plans for future work. Please add a rough schedule that allows us to judge whether your research plan is feasible.

Students in the later stages of their research are encouraged to include an overview of their completed research activities.

Proposals should be submitted through the conference submission site

Review Process

Submissions will be reviewed by members of the Doctoral Track Committee. The participants will be selected on the basis of their anticipated contribution to the consortium goals as well as the potential benefit to the students. Among the criteria that will be considered in reviewing submissions are:

● the potential quality of the research and its relevance to software engineering and the ICCSP and ICGSE communities;

● the stage of the research (see the Section "Who should participate" above);

● the diversity of backgrounds, research topics, and approaches.

Requirement to Register, Attend and Present

If a submission is accepted, the doctoral candidate must register for and attend the conference and present the research proposal. Depending on the policy of the main conference, the event will be held in person or virtually. Failure to meet this requirement may result in the proposal being withdrawn from the program and proceedings.

Formatting Instructions

All types of technical papers will be peer-reviewed according to the specified review criteria, hence it is required to choose the right type of paper according to the paper’s major contributions. Submissions must follow the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines , with title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type. LaTEX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf option. Purchases of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.

Papers submitted for consideration should not have been published elsewhere and should not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere for the duration of consideration. ACM plagiarism policy and procedures shall be followed for cases of double submission. The submission must also comply with the IEEE Policy on Authorship .

Upon notification of acceptance, authors of accepted papers will be asked to complete a copyright form and will receive further instructions for preparing their camera ready versions. At least one author of each accepted paper is expected to register and present the results at the ICSSP and ICGSE joint conference. ICSE 2021 has the right to pull papers out of the proceedings if there is no associated registration by two weeks past the early registration deadline. All accepted contributions with at least one registered author will be published in the conference electronic proceedings and appear in the digital libraries of both IEEE and ACM.

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 ICSE 2021. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Open Science Policy

The ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 encourages authors to submit replication packages and/or data sets with their papers, for the sake of transparency as replicability, as well as for facilitating the peer review process. The following guidelines are recommendations and not mandatory. Your choice will not affect the review process for your paper. Should you decide to embrace this policy, we strongly encourage you to archive empirical datasets on Dataverse, following Google guidelines to dataset providers , and share analysis scripts on freely accessible code repositories such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.

The ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 also encourages authors to self-archive a preprint of your accepted manuscript in arXiv.org or other similar open repositories. This is allowed by ACM and IEEE publishers for ICSE proceedings. Note that the final version of the paper, as laid out by the publisher, cannot be self-archived. Instead, manuscript with reviewer comments addressed must be used, but before applying the camera-ready instructions and templates.

Feel free to contact the ICSSP/ICGSE 2021 Program Chairs or proceedings chairs for more details.

Important Dates

● Research plan submission: Jan 29, 2021 (AoE)

● Acceptance notification: Mar 5, 2021 (AoE)

● Camera-ready due: Mar 22, 2021 (AoE)

● Doctoral Symposium: TBA, 2021

Chairs

● Djamel E. Khelladi, CNRS, Univ Rennes 1

● Nicole Novielli, University of Bari (Italy)