NIER - New Ideas and Emerging Results * ICSE 2018 *

Accepted Papers

Call for contributions

NIER provides a forum for innovative, thought-provoking research in software engineering with the goal of accelerating the exposure of the community to early yet promising and potentially inspiring research efforts.

To support this goal, NIER 2018 will publish two kinds of papers:

1. Reflections (on the past), such as:

• Startling results that call current research directions into question;
• Bold arguments on current research directions that may be somehow misguided;
• Results that disregard established results or believe of evidence that call for fundamentally new directions.

2. Visions (of the future):

• Bold visions of new directions that may not yet be supported by solid results, but rather by a strong and well-motivated scientific intuition. An example of such a vision can be unusual synergies with other disciplines or the importance of software engineering in problems where software engineering aspects have not been studied earlier.

The writing style can even be narrative to the extent where this supports the motivation for an emerging research direction.

Note that evaluation results are not required for NIER papers, but preliminary results providing initial support for the proposed ideas claimed are welcome.

The track addresses the same topics of interest as those of the ICSE 2018 technical research paper track. However, NIER authors are encouraged (1) to combine these topics in new ways, (2) to establish connections to other fields outside of classic software engineering, as well as (3) to argue for the importance of software engineering research in areas not explicitly listed.

Out of scope

NIER papers are not second-class ICSE research track papers. NIER is a forum for first-class contributions that provide novel, soundly motivated research directions and emerging results. Therefore, a NIER submission should not be an ICSE research submission with no or less evaluation, nor disguised advertisements for previously published results. For such out-of-scope submissions, authors should consider submitting to the main ICSE conference, one of the many ICSE workshops, or one of the satellite ICSE conferences.

Evaluation

All papers will be evaluated in terms of the following criteria:

• Value: the problem is worth exploring;
• Impact: the potential for disruption of current practice;
• Originality: of the paper’s insight;
• Synergy: the paper appropriately connects a set of concepts that were previously treated separately;
• Validity: soundness of the rationale;
• Scholarship: appropriate consideration of relevant literature;
• Quality: overall paper quality; and
• Surprise: startling and unexpected findings.

How to submit

(please read the “double-blind submission guideline” below)

Authors must specify one and only one of the most related pieces of work (in their opinion) in the first sentence of the related work section, and articulate how their work is novel and how its results are emerging. We understand that this selection is subjective and often an idea is related to many research papers. The goal of identifying the most related work is to help add an anchor point for articulating the novelty.

A NIER submission must conform at the time of submission to the ICSE 2018 submission and formatting instructions following ACM formatting guidelines, and must not exceed 4 pages, including all text, references, appendices, and figures. NIER papers must be submitted electronically at the NIER easychair submission site, by the submission deadline (see below). Submissions that do not comply with the instructions and size limits may be desk rejected.

At least one author of each paper is required to register for the ICSE 2018 conference and present their paper.

Note that authors of accepted papers are also highly encouraged to submit a poster describing their work. Posters will allow authors and interested participants to connect to each other and to engage in discussions about the work presented. Submissions that have been rejected overall but that got some positive feedback from the program committee will be also invited for poster presentations.

Double-blind submission guidelines

ICSE 2018 NIER will employ a lightweight double-blind review process. The papers submitted must not reveal the authors’ identities.

Author identities will be revealed to the program committee members during the online discussion period. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-blind review process. Authors having further questions on double blind reviewing are encouraged to contact the program chairs by e-mail. Papers that do not comply with the double blind review process will be desk-rejected.

Further advice, guidance and explanation about double-blind review process can be found at ICSE 2018 double blind review process document.

Important dates

• Submission deadline: October 23th, 2017
• Notification to authors: January 22nd, 2018
• Camera-ready deadline: February 132h, 2018

Program co-chairs

• Sven Apel, University of Passau
• Andrea Zisman, The Open University