ICSME 2025: Call for Papers

The 41st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2025) is the premier forum for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and challenges in software maintenance and evolution.

Goal and Scope

We invite high-quality submissions describing significant and unpublished results related to, but not limited to, the following software maintenance and evolution topics:

• Change and defect management
• Code cloning and provenance
• Concept and feature location
• Continuous integration/deployment
• Empirical studies of software maintenance and evolution
• Evolution of non-code artifacts
• Evolution and maintenance of AI-based applications
• Human factors and social aspects of software maintenance and evolution
• Large Language Models for software evolution and maintenance tasks
• Maintenance and evolution of model-based methods
• Maintenance and evolution of mobile apps
• Maintenance and evolution of service-oriented and cloud computing systems
• Maintenance and evolution processes
• Maintenance versus release process
• Mining software repositories
• Productivity of software engineers during maintenance and evolution
• Release engineering
• Reverse engineering and re-engineering
• Run-time evolution and dynamic configuration
• Software and system comprehension
• Software migration and renovation
• Software quality assessment
• Software refactoring and restructuring
• Software testing theory and practice
• Source code analysis and manipulation
• Technical Debt

ICSME welcomes innovative ideas that are timely, well-presented, and evaluated. All submissions must position themselves within the existing literature, describe the relevance of the results to specific software engineering goals, and include a clear motivation and presentation of the work.

Evaluation

Submissions that do not comply with the required submission format or that are out of scope will be desk-rejected without review. All eligible submissions will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. Evaluation criteria include importance of contribution, originality, quality of presentation, soundness, evaluation (where applicable), and comparison to related work. Replicability will also be evaluated where applicable.

Paper Submission

• Submission Link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icsme2025
• Format: Strictly adhere to the two-column IEEE conference proceedings format. Use the provided templates (LaTeX or MS Word).
• Page Limit: Maximum 10 pages (including figures and appendices) plus up to 2 pages containing ONLY references.
• File Type: All submissions must be in PDF.
• Policy: Submitted papers must comply with IEEE plagiarism policy. Papers must be original, unpublished, and not under review elsewhere. Submitting the same paper to different tracks is not allowed.

Double Anonymous Review

ICSME 2025 will use a double-anonymous reviewing process. Authors must omit names and affiliations, refer to their own work in the third person, and ensure the submission title differs from preprints on arXiv or similar sites. For more information, see https://icsme.github.io/faq_double_blind.html.

Special Issue

Authors of select papers from the research track will be invited to submit extended versions to a special issue of the Springer International Journal of Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), requiring approximately 30% new material.

Author Response Period

The author response period is scheduled from May 8, 2025, to May 15, 2025. Authors will have the opportunity to inspect reviews and respond to specific questions. Early decisions may be issued for papers with clear accept or reject outcomes.

Publication and Presentation

Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and submitted for inclusion in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference and present the paper. Failure to register by the early registration date or present the paper may result in withdrawal from the proceedings.

Open Science Policy

ICSME encourages open science, including sharing of data sets, replication packages, and preprints. Authors should make data available or provide justification for non-sharing. Artifacts should be anonymized. Sharing of accepted manuscripts on e-print servers like arXiv.org is encouraged.

Important Dates

All submission dates are at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth):

• Abstract submission: March 6, 2025 (passed; updates allowed until full paper deadline)
• Paper submission: March 13, 2025
• Early Decisions notification: May 7, 2025
• Author response period: May 8, 2025 - May 15, 2025
• Final notification: June 5, 2025
• Camera-ready submission: July 27, 2025