Technical Papers: Call for Papers

The 4th International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt 2021) will be held virtually (originally in Madrid, Spain) on May 19–21, 2021. As in previous editions TechDebt will be collocated with the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2021).

According to the Dagstuhl seminar 16162 definition “In software-intensive systems, technical debt is a collection of design or implementation constructs that are expedient in the short term, but set up a technical context that can make future changes more costly or impossible. Technical debt presents an actual or contingent liability whose impact is limited to internal system qualities, primarily maintainability and evolvability.”

The International Conference on Technical Debt provides a forum for practitioners and researchers to discuss research results and empirical findings related to Technical Debt and to share best practices and lessons learned in software development organizations. Acknowledging that Technical Debt is a multifaceted challenge faced daily by software professionals, the Technical Debt community promotes a healthy and collaborative partnership between academics and practitioners welcoming industrial studies and advances in tools.

TechDebt 2021 aims to bring together leading software engineering researchers and practitioners to discuss approaches for managing various types of Technical Debt, to share experiences and best practices and to identify key challenges for industry and academia.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Technical debt management and decision making
• Tools and indicators for identifying technical debt
• Technical debt in various software domains and development contexts
• Novel types of technical debt
• Replications and secondary studies of technical debt
• Technical debt remediation strategies, methods, and tools
• Conceptual frameworks for technical debt
• Experiences, approaches and tools for teaching technical debt topics in academic courses or industrial training

We invite submissions of papers to the Technical Track in any areas related to the theme and goal of the conference in the following categories:

• Research Papers (up to 10 pages): innovative and significant original research in the field
• Experience Papers (up to 10 pages): industrial experience, case studies, challenges, problems, and solutions
• Short Papers (up to 5 pages): position and future trend papers describing ongoing research or new results, descriptions or examples of problems and solutions in real-life settings that pose fundamental or characteristic challenges.

If you would like to submit a tool demo or description of a tool (either to complement your submission to the Technical Track or as a separate submission), please refer to the Tools Track of TechDebt 2021.

Submissions must be original and unpublished work. Each paper submitted to the main Technical Track will undergo a rigorous review process by at least three members of the program committee.

TechDebt 2021 adopts a double-blind review process for the main Technical Track (only). Therefore, all submissions to this track have to fulfill the double-blind reviewing requirements. Any submission that does not comply with these requirements may be desk-rejected without further review.

Evaluation criteria:

• Relevance: Submission must respond to Call for Papers.
• Novelty: Is there sufficient originality in the contribution, and is it clearly and correctly explained with respect to the state of the art?
• Soundness: Are all claimed contributions supported by the rigorous application of appropriate research methods? Claims should be scoped to what can be supported, and limitations should be discussed.
• Significance: Are contributions evaluated for their importance and impact with respect to the existing body of knowledge? The authors are expected to explicitly argue for the relevance and usefulness of the research and discuss the novelty of the claimed contributions through a comparison with pertinent related work.
• Replicability: Is there sufficient information in the paper for the results to be independently replicated? The evaluation of submissions will take into account the extent to which sufficient information is available to support the full or partial independent replication of the claimed findings.
• Presentation Quality: Are results clearly presented? Submissions are expected to meet high standards of presentation, including adequate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and respect of the formatting instructions.

The weighting and relevance of the above criteria varies for paper types.

Papers must be submitted electronically via the TechDebtConf2021 EasyChair site. Submissions must be in PDF and conform to the ACM formatting guidelines applied for ICSE 2021. Submissions may not exceed the number of pages specified above (including all text, references and figures). Purchase of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.

Formatting instructions are available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for both LaTeX and Word users. 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.

A selection of best papers will be invited to submit extended versions for tentative publication in a Special Section of the journal of Information and Software Technology published by Elsevier http://www.elsevier.com/locate/infsof.

Important dates:

• January 12 January 22, 2021: Research and Experience Paper submission deadline to EasyChair (extended)
• January 27 January 31, 2021: Short Paper submission deadline to EasyChair (extended)
• February 22 February 27, 2021: Notification to authors (updated)
• March 22, 2021: Camera-ready papers
• May 19–21, 2021: TechDebt Conference

Tools: Call for Tools

The 4th International Conference on Technical Debt will be held virtually (originally in Madrid, Spain), on May 19-21, 2021, collocated with ICSE 2021.

Technical debt is a metaphor that software developers and managers increasingly use to communicate key trade-offs between time to market and quality issues.

While other software engineering disciplines—such as software maintenance and evolution, refactoring, software quality, and empirical software engineering—have produced results relevant to managing technical debt, none of them alone suffice to model, manage, and communicate the different facets of the design trade-off problems involved in managing technical debt. Similarly, while many software engineering practices can be used to get ahead of technical debt, organizations struggle with managing technical debt routinely and strategically.

Tools play a critical role in understanding the management, monitoring, and measurement of technical debt in real-world situations. We invite researchers, practitioners and organizations to showcase new techniques, methods, and tools that can aid practitioners and decision makers in these critical tasks to participate in TechDebt 2021.

Submission types

Tools track accepts two types of submissions:

• Tool presentation papers (up to 5 pages): describe innovative and original tools addressing technical debt issues or aiming at the management of technical debt. Submitted tool papers will be peer-reviewed and accepted submissions will be published in the conference proceedings.
• Extended abstract (1-2 pages): describe innovative and original initial tools idea for which there is not yet a prototype in order to obtain early feedback. Extended abstracts provide practitioners with an opportunity to showcase a tool-specific perspective. Extended abstracts are not peer reviewed and will not be published in the conference proceedings.

Suggested content for both types of submissions, the program committee and chairs will look for:

• The alignment to the overarching technical debt theme of the conference.
• How the purpose of the tool is addressed and how validation experiences with practitioners have been planned or conducted (if applicable)

Submission process

In EasyChair, on top of specifying the type of submission, indicate how you will participate in the conference session (you may select one or both):

• Panel participant: In the panel discussion we will engage participants and the audience on how the showcased tools help address technical debt challenges.
• Tool demonstration: If you propose to showcase your tool or product from your organization, please let us know your requirements *(such as space, equipment, …). A dedicated demo session will be part of the Tools track.

All accepted papers will also have the possibility to bring a poster during the conference.

Papers and extended abstract must be submitted electronically via the TechDebtConf2021 EasyChair site. Submissions must be in PDF and conform to the ACM formatting guidelines applied for ICSE 2021. Submissions may not exceed the number of pages specified above (including all text, references and figures). Purchases of additional pages in the proceedings are not allowed.

Formatting instructions are available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for both LaTeX and Word users.

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.

Accepted papers must be presented in person at the conference by one of the authors. Accepted submissions will be published as part of the ICSE co-located events proceedings.

Important dates

• January 27 January 31, 2021: Tool presentation papers (up to 5 pages) (extended)
• February 24, 2021: Notification of acceptance or rejection
• March 22, 2021: Camera-ready papers
• March 30, 2021: Extended abstracts (up to 2 pages)
• April 10, 2021: Notification of acceptance or rejection for Extended abstracts
• May 23–24, 2021: TechDebt Conference

Further inquiries

All inquiries may be directed to track chairs:
Marcus Ciolkowski: marcus.ciolkowski@qaware.de
Valentina Lenarduzzi: valentina.lenarduzzi@lut.fi

Accepted Papers

Despite the sad but necessary decision to go virtual, it would be a shame to let Madrid go unnoticed in TechDebt 2021. So, we selected a few videos that we hope will both prepare and get you excited to visit Madrid at the first chance.

Tour of Madrid in VR-360° (7.57 mins)

Madrid city guide (3.11 mins)

Best things to do in Madrid (9.49 mins)

The Majesty of Madrid (26.08 mins)

Keynotes videos and slides

Below the keynotes videos and slides:

Marcus Ciolkowski, QAware:

Video

Slides

Jan Bosch, Chalmers University of Technology:

Video1

Video 2