FASE 2025

Submissions should make novel contributions to making software engineering a more mature and soundly-based discipline. Contributions should be supported by appropriate arguments and validation. Contributions that combine the development of conceptual and methodological advances with their formal foundations and tool support are particularly encouraged. We welcome contributions to all such fundamental approaches, including:

• applications of AI to software engineering, including search-based, learning-based approaches, and advances in code generation and program synthesis, automated testing and debugging, software documentation and program understanding, intelligent code review and refactoring, DevOps and AIOps, and applications of large language models (LLMs).
• software engineering foundations for AI-based systems, for example with focus on: explainability, transparency and trust, data management, testing and verification, lifecycle management, system architecture;
• software quality and testing: validation and verification of functional and non-functional software properties ( including security and data privacy) using techniques such as theorem proving, model checking, testing, analysis, simulation, refinement methods, metrics or visualization techniques;
• software engineering as an engineering discipline, including its interaction with and impact on society and economics;
• ethical and responsible software engineering: prioritizing fairness, transparency, and accountability in AI and software systems while addressing societal concerns like inequality and bias;
• requirements engineering: capture, consistency, and change management of software requirements, natural language processing for requirement elicitation;
• software architectures: description and analysis of the architecture, e.g., SOA, microservice architectures, cloud-native architectures, event-driven architectures, model-driven architectures, or software product lines;
• specification, design, and implementation of particular classes of systems: (self-)adaptive, autonomous, collaborative, intelligent, embedded, distributed, mobile, pervasive, cyber-physical, data-centric, service-oriented applications, multi-agent systems, safety-critical, real-time, blockchain-based, mixed-reality systems, human-in-the-loop systems or digital twins;
• model-driven engineering: model transformation, meta-modelling, design and semantics of domain-specific languages, consistency and synchronization of models, generative architectures, low-code and no-code development;
• software processes: support for iterative, agile, and open source development;
• software evolution: refactoring, reverse and re-engineering, configuration management and architectural change, mining software repositories.

Selected papers from the FASE proceedings will be invited to submit an extended version to the Elsevier journal Science of Computer Programming (SCP). All publications in the special issue will be open access.

Detailed information on artifact evaluation will be published soon.

FASE 2025 solicits four types of submissions: research papers, empirical evaluation papers, new ideas and emerging results (NIER) papers, tool demonstration papers and data showcase papers. Submissions must follow the formatting guidelines of Springer’s LNCS (use the llncs.cls class) and be submitted electronically in pdf through the Easychair author interface.

Research papers clearly identify and justify a principled advance to the fundamentals of software engineering. Research papers should clearly articulate their contribution, and provide sufficient evidence for the soundness and applicability of the proposed approach. Research papers are expected to be 15–18 pp (excluding bibliography). Additional material intended for reviewers but not for publication in the final version may be included in a clearly marked appendix.

Empirical evaluation papers evaluate existing software challenges or critically validate current proposed solutions with scientific means, i.e., by empirical studies, controlled experiments, rigorous case studies, simulations, etc. Scientific reflection on problems and practices in the software industry also falls into this category. We also encourage authors to replicate results from previous papers. A replicability study must go beyond simply re-implementing an algorithm and/or re-running the artifacts provided by the original paper, but should at least apply the approach to new, significantly broadened inputs, and clearly report on results that the authors were able to replicate as well as on aspects of the work that were not replicable. Empirical evaluation papers are expected to be 15–18 pp (excluding bibliography). Additional material intended for reviewers but not for publication in the final version may be included in a clearly marked appendix.

New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) papers seek to disrupt the status quo with forward-looking, thought-provoking, innovative research on the foundations of software engineering, as well as lessons learned from the past. Our aim is to accelerate the exposure of the ETAPS community to early yet potentially ground-breaking research results, and to techniques and perspectives that challenge the status quo. To broadly capture this goal, the NIER track at FASE 2024 will publish the following types of papers:

• Innovative or groundbreaking new ideas at early stages of research, supported by promising initial results and intuitions;
• Visions of new directions: synergies with other fields or foundational approaches to problems that currently lack foundations in software engineering;
• Lessons from the past: thoughtful observations on past or current research directions that may be somehow misguided or that let us see current research directions from a new perspective.

NIER papers are expected to be 6–8 pp (excluding bibliography). NIER papers will be assessed primarily on their level of originality, relevance, and potential for impact on the field in terms of promoting innovative thinking. Hence, inadequacies in the state-of-the-art and the pertinence, correctness, and impact of the idea/vision/lesson must be described clearly. A full evaluation is not required for FASE NIER papers, but preliminary evaluation results may help the reviewers understand the scope of the work better.

Tool demonstration papers and data showcase papers present a new tool, a new tool component, novel extensions to an existing tool, or a new dataset. They should provide a short description of the theoretical foundations and emphasize the design and implementation concerns, including software architecture. Tool papers should give a clear account of the tool’s functionality and discuss the tool’s practical capabilities with reference to the type and size of problems it can handle. Authors are strongly encouraged to make their tools publicly available, preferably on the web. Experimental evaluation is not required for tools, however, a motivation as to why the tool is interesting and significant should be provided. Dataset papers should describe the curation of datasets essential for software engineering research, replication studies, reporting of negative results, and insights gleaned from mining software repositories. Papers in this category are expected to be 6–8 pp (excluding bibliography). They should have an appendix of up to 6 additional pages with details on the actual demonstration.