Special Track SBES 40 Years

Call for Papers

The Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES) is a leading Software Engineering event in Latin America. SBES is held jointly with CBSoft – the Brazilian Conference on Software: Theory and Practice, which traditionally brings together academics, professionals, and students.

The SBES 40 Years Special Track marks its fortieth anniversary. It aims to discuss the evolution of software engineering in Brazilian academia and industry. SBES is a reference for the Brazilian scientific community, bringing together senior researchers and undergraduate and graduate students, always seeking integration and alignment with the international community. Its main axes address research, education, products (tools), industry, innovative ideas, and emerging topics. Since its first edition, SBES tracks have progressively improved; currently, they are highly competitive. SBES is a precursor of CBSoft, a conference that currently brings together several events such as SBCARS (Brazilian Symposium on Software Components, Architectures, and Reuse), SBLP (Brazilian Symposium on Programming Languages), and SAST (Brazilian Symposium on Systematic and Automated Software Testing); it also initially brought together communities that later evolved into events such as the Brazilian Symposium on Formal Methods (SBMF) and the Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality (SBQS). This special track is expected to provide an opportunity for researchers, practitioners, and educators to discuss trends, experiences, and concerns in Brazilian Software Engineering research, as well as to reflect on actions that may improve community integration.

Topics of Interest

The SBES 40 Years Special Track invites researchers and educators to submit papers on the evolution of software engineering in Brazilian academia and industry, including retrospective and prospective views of Software Engineering research and practice in Brazil. Papers may be full (10 pages of content plus up to 2 pages of references) or short (4 pages of content plus up to 1 page of references). Submissions may address the impact of Software Engineering on Brazilian industry and society, and may also propose future research challenges. Examples of topics include, but are not limited to:

• assessment of the state of the art of Brazilian research in software engineering;
• retrospective analyses of specific software engineering research themes in Brazil;
• future challenges for software engineering;
• public policies needed for the evolution of software engineering;
• challenges in industry–academia collaboration in software engineering in Brazil;
• perspectives and challenges of using artificial intelligence in software engineering;
• views on the software engineering job market in Brazil;
• analysis of the impact of Brazilian software engineering research in the international landscape;
• reflections on software engineering education, including technical programs, undergraduate and graduate education.

Important Dates

Open Science Policies

SBES 2026 encourages authors to adopt Open Science principles and practices to promote transparency, replicability, and reproducibility. Authors are encouraged to share curated and anonymized data and/or artifacts whenever possible. We acknowledge that reproducibility or replicability may not apply to qualitative research and that, as in industrial studies, qualitative research often faces challenges in data sharing . Following international practices, submissions to the SBES 40 Years Special Track must include an unnumbered section entitled "Artifact Availability" after the "Conclusion" section, and:

• make artifact(s) available to the Program Committee (via supplementary material upload or an anonymous repository link) and provide instructions on how to access them; or
• include an explicit statement explaining why this is not possible or desirable; and
• indicate why the authors do not intend to make their data or study materials publicly available after acceptance, if applicable. The default understanding is that data or other artifacts will be made publicly available after paper acceptance.

The document SBES 2026 – Open Science Policies presents Open Science principles and practices to support authors of the SBES 40 Years Special Track. Questions may be directed to the SBES 2026 Open Science Chairs during paper preparation without breaking anonymity.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or AI-Assisted Technologies

By submitting a paper to SBES 2026, authors acknowledge compliance with the generative AI usage policy, based on existing policies from IEEE, ACM, and Springer.

Prohibited:

• Listing generative AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT) as paper authors.
• Submitting papers or sections fully generated by generative AI tools.

Permitted (with explicit acknowledgment):

• Using generative AI tools to create parts of the content, with explicit acknowledgment describing what was generated and which tool was used.

Permitted (without acknowledgment):

• Using AI tools to improve image quality (contrast, clarity).
• Using generative AI tools to edit and improve the quality of existing text (e.g., grammar, spelling, clarity).

Paper Preparation and Submission

Submissions must be original and not under review elsewhere. Papers may be written in Portuguese or English; English submissions provide greater international visibility.

Papers must be submitted in PDF format and strictly follow the ACM SIGCONF two-column format available at:

• Template ACM

LaTeX users must use the acmart.cls class provided in the template, with the conference format enabled in the document preamble:

\documentclass[sigconf,anonymous]{acmart}

In addition, some sections of the standard ACM template must be removed. To do so, use the following commands:

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

The bibliography style provided in the template, ACM-Reference-Format.bst, must be used:

\bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}

After the Conclusion section, authors must include an unnumbered section entitled "Artifact Availability":

\section*{Artifact Availability}

Two types of papers are eligible. Full papers must be at most 10 (ten) pages long, including all figures, tables, appendices, and acknowledgments, with up to 2 (two) additional pages allowed for references. Short papers must be at most 6 (six) pages long, including all figures, tables, appendices, and acknowledgments, with up to 1 (one) additional page allowed for references. Papers must be registered and submitted through the JEMS system.

Paper registration: Authors must provide the paper title, authors, abstract, topics of interest, and the paper language.

Paper submission: Authors must submit a PDF file containing the paper.

The publication of papers accepted to the SBES 40 Years Special Track requires that at least one of the authors be registered for CBSoft 2026 (in accordance with the registration rules established by the local organizing committee), as well as that the paper be presented in person during SBES 2026. Papers that are not presented will not be included in the SBES 2026 proceedings.

Anonymization

The SBES 40 Years Special Track adopts a double-anonymous review process. Submitted papers must conceal the authors’ names and affiliations. In addition, the following rules must be observed:

• Citations to the authors' own related work must be written in the third person. For example, authors should write "the previous work by Silva et al." instead of "in our previous work." Authors should also avoid terms and repositories that may identify them, such as "we," "our," "funding," "university," "GitHub repositories," etc.

• The submitted paper must not mention artifacts hosted in repositories or websites that allow the identification of the authors. Research artifacts must be made available anonymously. To anonymize repositories hosted on GitHub, the Anonymous service (https://anonymous.4open.science/) is recommended.

• If the submitted paper presents an extension or evolution of prior work, references to that work may be anonymized. For example, "based on the work by Silva et al." may be replaced with "based on our previous work [Ref]," and the corresponding reference may be listed in the references section as "[Ref] reference omitted due to double-anonymous review."

Reviewers will not be encouraged to search for information that may identify the authors in other sources. Searches in digital libraries or existing artifacts do not invalidate the double-anonymous review rules.

In the event of paper acceptance, all information omitted during submission must be included in the final version. Questions regarding the preparation of papers according to the anonymization rules of the SBES 40 Years Special Track may be addressed to the Program Committee Chairs.

Desk rejection

Papers that are out of scope for the SBES 40 Years Special Track, or that do not comply with the required format or anonymization rules, will be desk-rejected without review.

If a simultaneous submission or prior publication of a paper submitted to SBES in another venue (conference or journal) is identified and reported at any time, the paper will be rejected, and the authors may be barred from submitting papers to future editions of SBES. In addition, the organizers of the other venue will be notified.

If evidence of the use of generative AI tools in a submission is observed and such use does not comply with the recommendations for generative AI usage specified in this call, the paper will be rejected without review, and the authors may be barred from submitting papers to future editions of SBES.

Paper Review Criteria

The evaluation criteria for papers submitted to the SBES 40 Years Special Track are defined as follows:

• Relevance: The extent to which the paper is relevant to advancing the body of knowledge on the evolution of research and practice in Software Engineering in Brazil.
• Significance: The extent to which the paper’s contributions are original and important with respect to the existing literature on the evolution of research and practice in Software Engineering in Brazil.
• Verifiability: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to support independent verification or replication of the contributions presented. This includes, when applicable, the public availability of research data or an explicit statement explaining why such data cannot be made publicly available.
• Actionability: The extent to which the paper provides contemporary and forward-looking reflections on the field, as well as practical recommendations with clear take-away messages.
• Lessons Learned: The extent to which the paper meaningfully discusses lessons learned, including what worked well, what did not, and what could be improved if the experience were to be repeated.
• Presentation: The extent to which the organization and writing quality of the paper meet expected standards: the paper is well structured, uses clear and correct academic language, avoids ambiguity, includes clearly readable figures and tables, and is properly formatted.

Best Paper Award

The SBES Steering Committee will appoint a committee to select the best papers from the symposium tracks, which will be announced during the event.

The Program Committee Chairs reserve the right to nominate for the award only those papers deemed suitable, including the possibility that no paper from this track will be nominated.

Organization

Program Committee Chairs — SBES 40 Years Special Track

• Itana Maria de Souza Gimenes (UEM)
• Rodrigo Bonifácio (UFPE)

Program Committee

• To be announced