Insightful Ideas and Emerging Results Track

Call for Papers

The goal of the Insightful Ideas and Emerging Results (IIER) Track of the Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES) is to provide researchers and practitioners with a forum for presenting and discussing innovative and promising ideas in the early stages of research. As such, these ideas do not require a strong empirical evaluation, but rather preliminary results providing initial support for the feasibility of proposed new ideas. The ultimate goal is to offer exposure of ground-breaking early research results, techniques and perspectives that challenge the status quo of the Software Engineering discipline. Therefore, this track welcomes two types of papers:

• Forward-looking ideas: Exciting new directions or techniques that may have yet to be supported by solid experimental results, but are nonetheless supported by strong and well-argued scientific intuitions as well as concrete plans going forward.
• Thought-provoking reflections: Bold and unexpected results and reflections that can help us look at current research directions under a new light, calling for new directions for future research.

This track has been organized since SBES 2015 and the previous proceedings are available at IEEE (2015), ACM (2016 to 2023) and SOL (2024 and 2025) digital libraries.

Important Dates

Topics of Interest

Submissions related (but not limited to) the following topics will be accepted:

• Apps and app store analysis
• Automation of Software Engineering Tasks with LLMs and Foundational Models
• API design and evolution
• Configuration management
• Continuous software engineering
• Crow-based software engineering
• Design for quality, including privacy and security by design
• Distributed and collaborative software engineering
• Diversity, inclusion and fairness of software
• Embedded and cyber-physical systems
• Ethics in software engineering
• Evolution and maintenance
• Feedback, user and requirements engineering
• Green and sustainable technologies
• Human and social aspects of software engineering
• Legal aspects of software engineering
• Low-code/no-code
• Machine learning (ML) with and for software engineering
• Mining software repositories
• Modeling and model-driven engineering
• Privacy and security
• Productivity in software engineering
• Recommender systems
• Refactoring
• Release engineering and DevOps
• Reliability and safety
• Requirements engineering, modeling and design
• Reverse engineering
• Search-based software engineering
• Software architecture and product design
• Software economics
• Software ecosystems and systems-of-systems
• Software engineering in industrial applications
• Software engineering in society
• Software engineering for specific technologies/platforms (e.g., cloud, IoT, mobile)
• Software metrics and prediction models
• Software processes and quality models
• Software reuse
• Software services and cloud-based systems
• Software verification, validation, and testing
• Software visualization
• Technical debt management
• Variability and product lines

Evaluation Criteria

This track seeks for cutting-edge and disruptive contributions. A submission for the IIER track should not be considered as a paper that would be submitted to the SBES research track without a strong evaluation. This is not the focus of this track! Papers will be reviewed according to the following quality criteria, giving special emphasis to the originality of the contribution.

• Novelty: The extent to which the contributions are cutting-edge, have potential impact for disruption of current practice or are sufficiently original with respect to the state-of-the-art;
• Significance: The extent to which the paper’s contributions can impact the field of Software Engineering, and under which assumptions (if any), including a strong motivation to demonstrate the problem is worthy being studied;
• Soundness: The extent to which the paper’s contributions and the authors’ plans for future work are based rigorous application of appropriate research methods;
• Verifiability: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to understand how an innovation works; to understand how data was obtained, analyzed, and interpreted;
• Presentation: The extent to which the paper’s quality of writing meets high standards, including clear descriptions, as well as adequate use of the English/Portuguese language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and adherence to the formatting instructions provided; and
• Reproducibility and Replicability: the extent to which the paper supports independent verification or replication of its claimed contributions, within the expected limitations of work submitted to this track and considering open-science policy requirements.

Open Science Policies

SBES 2026 encourages authors to adopt Open Science principles and practices, seeking to promote transparency, replicability, and reproducibility in research. We encourage all contributing authors to disclose data/artifacts (anonymized and curated) to increase reproducibility and replicability. We recognize that reproducibility or replicability is not a goal in qualitative research and that, as in industrial studies, qualitative studies often face challenges when sharing research data.

In this context, following international events in the area, when submitting to the Insightful Ideas and Emerging Results Track, authors of papers involving studies must create an unnumbered section entitled "Artifacts Availability" after the "Conclusion" section and:

• make your artifact available to the program committee (via upload of supplementary material or a link to an anonymous repository) and provide instructions on how to access this data in that section of the paper; or
• include in the paper an explicit statement about why this is not possible or desirable; ou
• indicate why you do not intend to make the data or study materials publicly available upon acceptance, if applicable. The standard understanding is that data and/or other artifacts will be publicly available upon acceptance of an article.

The document "SBES 2025 - Open Science Policies" presents Open Science principles and practices to support the authors. During the preparation of the paper, questions can be forwarded to the SBES 2026 Open Science chairs, without incurring a breach of the anonymization.

Paper Preparation, Submission, and Review

Papers can be written in Portuguese or English. English Submissions are strongly encouraged. Submitted papers must not have been simultaneously submitted to any other forum (conference or journal) nor should already have been published elsewhere. At least one author of each accepted paper must register at CBSoft 2026 and present in-person the paper during the symposium; otherwise, the paper will not be included in the proceedings.

Papers must be submitted in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) format and strictly follow the 2-column ACM_SigConf format, available at: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. LaTeX users must use the acmart.cls class provided in the template with the conference format enabled at the document preamble:

\documentclass[sigconf,anonymous]{acmart}

Additionally, some sections must be removed from the standard ACM template using:

\setcopyright{none}
\settopmatter{printccs=false}
\settopmatter{printacmref=false}
\renewcommand\footnotetextcopyrightpermission[1]{} 

Authors must use the ACM-Reference-Format.bst bibliography style also provided in the template:

\bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}

After the Conclusion section, authors must include an unnumbered section titled "Artifacts Availability":

\section*{Artifacts Availability}

Submissions must be no up to 6 pages, including all figures, and might use an additional page for references. Papers must be electronically submitted through the jems3.sbc.org.br/sbes2025-iier'>JEMS 3 system. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three PC members. Paper must be submitted electronically through JEMS 3 in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF).

The submission is a two-step process:

1. Abstract submission: Authors must provide the paper title, authors, abstract, associated topic(s), and the language; and
2. Full paper submission: Authors must upload a PDF file containing the paper.

Anonymization

The SBES 2026 Insightful Ideas and Emerging Results Track will follow a double-anonymous review process. All submitted papers should conceal the identity of the authors. Both author names and affiliations must be omitted. In addition, the following rules should be addressed:

• Citations to own related work must be written in the third person. For example, one must write "the previous work of Silva et al." as opposed to "our previous work." As a heuristic, occurrences of "we", "our", "ours", "github", "funding", "university", etc. should be looked at in the paper and removed prior to submitting.
• In the submitted paper, any artifact in a repository or website that allows identifying the authorship should not be mentioned. If any artifact needs to be made available, it should be anonymized in the repository/website. A suggestion for anonymizing repositories is using https://anonymous.4open.science.
• Reviewers will not be encouraged to look for references that identify the authors in other sources on the Internet. Searches in digital libraries or existing artifacts do not break the double-anonymous policy.
• If the submitted paper is a follow up of a previous work, the reference may be anonymized in the submitted paper. For example, "the previous work of Silva et al." should be adapted to "based on the previous work [X]" and the reference at the end of the paper should not be presented in full. Please, indicate as "[X] Anonymous authors. Not presented due to double-anonymous review."

After the paper acceptance, all the paper information (without anonymization) must be included in the camera-ready version.

Any questions about the preparation of the paper following the double-anonymous rules can be sent to the PC Chairs.

On use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) or AI-assisted technologies in research papers

When submitting to SBES 2026, the authors acknowledge that they comply with the Generative AI usage policy, based on existing policies proposed by IEEE, ACM, and Springer.

It's forbidden to:

• List Generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT, as authors of the submission; and
• Use texts or sections entirely produced by generative AI tools.

It is allowed (with explicit disclosure in the acknowledgments) to:

• Use generative AI tools to create parts of the content, with disclosure in the paper acknowledgments indicating what was generated and which tool was used. It is important to check the terms of use of the tool, which is the responsibility of the authors. For example, in the acknowledgments: "ChatGPT was used to generate the first paragraph of Section 3 and to generate Table 3.2."

It is allowed (no need to mention):

• Use AI or AI-assisted technologies to improve the quality of images in terms of contrast and clarity; and
• Use generative AI tools to edit and improve the quality of your existing text (similar to an assistant like Grammarly to improve spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement).

Desk Rejection

Articles that fall outside the scope of the SBES 2026 Innovative Ideas and Emerging Results Track, or that do not comply with the required format and anonymization rules, will be disqualified and rejected without entering the review process.

If a previous publication of the paper or simultaneous submission for a refereed venue (event or journal) is reported, the paper will be rejected and authors may be prevented from submitting papers in future SBES editions. In addition, the organizers of the other venue will be communicated about this situation.

If evidence is found that generative AI tools were used in the submission in ways that do not comply with the guidelines for the use of generative AI in this call, the paper will be rejected without review, and the authors may be prevented from submitting papers in future SBES editions.

Outstanding Reviewer Award

The SBES 2026 Innovative Ideas and Emerging track acknowledges the generosity of the reviewers who give their time and best effort to referee submitted papers. A certificate of Outstanding Reviewer of the Insightful Ideas and Emerging Results Track will be awarded to reviewers who submitted outstanding quality and on-time reviews. The evaluation will be based on the quality and usefulness of the reviews, as well as participation in the PC discussion.

General Information

Publication of the work requires that at least one author register for and attend SBES 2026 in São Paulo in person to present the paper. Presentation is mandatory for all accepted papers. The presentation format and schedule will be announced at a later date.

Program Committee Chairs - Insightful Ideas and Emerging Results Track

Thelma Colanzi - Universidade Estadual de Maringá (UEM)

Cleidson de Souza - Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA)

Insightful Ideas and Emerging Results Track