Topics of interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

* Cognitive theories for program comprehension, including experiments and case studies;
* Comprehension of specific types of software systems, such as web-based systems, multi-language systems, legacy systems, object-oriented frameworks, component-based software, product line systems, and other large-scale systems;
* Comprehension in the context of specific lifecycle activities, such as maintenance, reengineering, migration, security, auditing, inspection before purchase, and testing;
* Visualization in support of program comprehension.

A special issue of the Empirical Software Engineering, An International Journal (http://www.springer.com/computer/programming/journal/10664) will feature extended, revised versions of the best papers accepted at ICPC 2010.

We are soliciting participation through the submission of research or experience papers, the organization of working sessions, the presentation of posters, or tool demonstrations.

Technical papers

Papers must be original work and are limited to 10 pages for full papers and 4 pages for short papers, in the IEEE CS proceedings style. Submissions must not be previously published in, currently submitted to, or currently in consideration for any journal, book, conference, or workshop. For an accepted paper to appear in the proceedings, at least one author must attend the event and present the work. A number of full technical paper submissions may be accepted as short papers.

Working sessions

The ICPC working sessions are forums for small groups of people who are engaged in research in the same subfield. The working sessions are meant to foster the exchange of ideas and to advance the state of research through focused interactions of the participants. The descriptions of the accepted working sessions will be included in the conference proceedings (up to 4 pages in the IEEE CS proceedings style). The proposals should indicate a set of issues to be discussed in the session and should indicate some likely participants.

Posters and tool demos

Posters describing preliminary research ideas will be exhibited in a separate session to foster informal an exchange between the exhibitors and the participants. Poster submissions are not required to cover completed major research results. A session for tool demonstrations will cover both industry-strength tools and academic prototypes. Accepted posters and tool demonstrations will be included in the conference proceedings (up to 2 pages in the IEEE CS proceedings style). The poster/tool proposals should indicate the novelty of the approach and how the ideas will be presented.

Industrial Comprehension Challenge

The main goal of the industrial comprehension challenge track is to create a dialog between academic researchers and industrial practitioners. Therefore, we invite proposals for presentations from industry which discuss the real program comprehension problems that they are experiencing in their day-to-day work and pose a challenge to the ICPC audience to help them in solving that problem over the coming year. We aim for a followup session in the next conference to present results and discuss challenges in their industrial adoption.