ICPC 2025: Call for Papers

The 33rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2025) is the premier venue for work in the area of software program comprehension. It encompasses human activities for comprehending the software as well as methodologies and technologies for supporting such comprehension. ICPC 2025 is co-located with ICSE 2025.

Important Dates

• Conference Dates: Sunday, April 27 - Monday, April 28, 2025

Research Contributions

ICPC 2025 solicits four main categories of research contributions, in addition to Journal First papers accepted for presentation:

• Research Papers: Describe original work.
• Early Research Achievement (ERA) Papers: Report early research results to foster discussion.
• Replications and Negative Results (RENE) Papers: Concerned with re-execution of existing research or presentation of sound empirical methods leading to negative results.
• Tool Demonstrations: Report on new instruments making program comprehension methods available and usable to practitioners.
• Journal First Papers: Accepted for presentation from selected journals.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest for all tracks include but are not limited to:

• Empirical evaluations of program comprehension tools, techniques, and approaches;
• Human aspects in program comprehension, including collaborative software engineering practices, gender considerations, information processing strategies, the role of emotions, emotional awareness, and more;
• Cognitive theories for program comprehension accompanied by different empirical strategies, including experiments, surveys, and case studies;
• Topics at the intersection between program comprehension and programming education;
• Individual, collaborative, distributed, and global program comprehension;
• Novel visualization or summarization techniques and interfaces to support program comprehension, including searching, browsing, and analyzing;
• Comprehension of specific types of software systems, such as open/closed source, mobile applications, spreadsheets, web-based systems, legacy systems, product lines, libraries, multi-threaded applications, and systems of systems;
• Comprehension in the context of diverse software process models and specific lifecycle activities, such as: maintenance, evolution, re-engineering, migration, security, auditing, and testing;
• Comprehension of software artifacts ranging from requirements documents to test cases and crash logs; from API documentation to models, meta-models and model transformation; and from Stack Overflow questions & answers to GitHub code review messages or video tutorials - all software artifacts and formal or informal documentation that software developers encounter when creating or evolving software;
• Comprehension and legal issues, such as due diligence, intellectual property and licensing, reverse engineering, and litigation; Issues and case studies in the transfer of program comprehension technology to industry;
• Automated tool support for program comprehension.

Awards

• A subset of the Research Track papers accepted for presentation at ICPC 2025 will be invited to be revised and extended for consideration in a thematic special issue of the Springer Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE).
• The best papers of the research track will be awarded with an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICPC.
• ICPC 2025 will feature ICPC Honorable Mentions, special awards assigned to papers that have applied extremely novel and/or outstanding research methods.

Format and Submission Guidelines

• Submissions must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines.
  • LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options.
• All submissions must not exceed 10 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, appendices, etc.
• Two additional pages containing only references are permitted.
• All submissions must be in PDF.
• Accepted papers will be allowed one extra page for the main text of the camera-ready version.
• Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in desk rejection.

Policies

By submitting to the ICPC Research Track, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. Papers submitted to ICPC 2025 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for ICPC 2025. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate action will be taken.

Authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects.

ORCID ID

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, as it will be a requirement to complete the publishing process for accepted papers.

Double-Anonymous Review Process

ICPC 2025 Research Track will employ a double-anonymous review process. Authors must make every effort to honor this process:

• Authors’ names must be omitted from the submission.
• All references to the author’s prior work should be in the third person.
• While authors have the right to upload preprints on ArXiV or similar sites, they must avoid specifying that the manuscript was submitted to ICPC 2025.
• During review, authors should not publicly use the submission title. They should thus use a different paper title for any pre-print.
• Carefully review any supplementary material to ensure it conforms to the double-anonymous policy (e.g., scrub code and data repositories of names, metadata).

Further advice can be found on the ICSE Q&A page.

Authorship Policy

By submitting, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM and the authorship policy of the IEEE.

Submission Site

Submissions to the Technical Track that meet the above requirements can be made via the Research Track submission site:

https://icpc2025-technical.hotcrp.com

We encourage authors to upload their paper info early (and can submit the PDF later) to properly enter conflicts for double-anonymous reviewing. It is the sole responsibility of the authors to ensure that the formatting guidelines, double-anonymous guidelines, and any other submission guidelines are met at the time of paper submission.

Exclusions

Submissions from the ICPC 2025 General Chair, Program Chairs, their current students, and current postdocs are not allowed to any ICPC 2025 track.

Open Science Policy

The research track of ICPC 2025 strives to abide by Open Science policies. All research results should be accessible to the public, if possible, and empirical studies should be reproducible. Authors are encouraged to disclose (anonymized and curated) data to increase reproducibility and replicability. Sharing research data is not mandatory, but is expected to be the default; non-sharing needs to be justified.

Upon submission, authors are asked:

• To make their data available to the program committee (via upload of supplemental material or a link to an anonymous repository) – and provide instructions on how to access this data in the paper; or
• To include in the paper an explanation as to why this is not possible or desirable; and
• To indicate if they intend to make their data publicly available upon acceptance.

Review and Evaluation Criteria

Research papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee. Reviewers will remain anonymous.

Submissions will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

• Soundness: The extent to which the paper’s contributions are supported by rigorous application of appropriate research methods;
• Significance: The extent to which the paper’s contributions impact program comprehension, and if needed, under which assumptions;
• Novelty: The extent to which the contributions are sufficiently original with respect to the state of the art and clearly explained and contrasted against it;
• Verifiability: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to support independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions;
• Presentation: The extent to which the paper’s quality of writing meets the standards of ICPC, including clear descriptions and explanations, appropriate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and adherence to the formatting instructions.

Author Response Period

ICPC 2025 will offer an author response period, allowing authors to inspect reviews and answer specific questions raised by the program committee.

Withdrawing a Paper

Authors can withdraw their paper at any moment until the final decision has been made, through the paper submission system. Resubmitting to another venue before withdrawing from ICPC 2025 is a violation of the concurrent submission policy.

Publication and Presentation

• Upon notification of acceptance, at least one author of the paper is required to register for ICPC 2025, attend the conference, and present the paper in person (unless impossible due to travel limitations).
• All accepted papers will be published in the conference electronic proceedings.
• 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 ICPC 2025.
• Purchases of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.