Topics of Interest

VEM provides a forum where researchers and practitioners from academia and industry can present and discuss research related to software visualization, maintenance, and evolution. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Continuous integration and deployment
• Education on software maintenance and evolution
• Human aspects of software maintenance and evolution
• Industrial experience with using software visualization
• Integration of software visualization tools with development environments
• Mining software repositories
• New technologies applied to software visualization
• Program comprehension
• Program repair
• Software analytics
• Software architecture
• Software evolution analysis
• Software migration and renovation
• Software quality
• Software refactoring and restructuring
• Software reverse engineering and reengineering
• Software testing and debugging
• Source code analysis and manipulation
• Source code change analysis
• Source code readability and legibility
• Static and dynamic source code visualization
• Sustainable software engineering
• Visualization of or to support software development activities (e.g., software testing)
• Visualization-based techniques in software engineering education

Papers presenting studies, tools, datasets, or innovative ideas are welcome. Experimental evaluation of new tools and ideas is desirable, but it is not a precondition to submitting a paper to the workshop. VEM encourages the submission of research in progress and preliminary results.

Open Science Policy

Openness in science is the key to fostering progress via transparency, reproducibility, and replicability. Ideally, all research output should be accessible to the public, and all empirical studies should be reproducible. VEM 2023 encourages authors to disclose: 1) the source code of relevant software used or proposed in the paper, including that used to retrieve and analyze data, 2) the data used and/or produced in the paper, and 3) instructions for other researchers describing how to reproduce or replicate the results.

Important Dates

All dates refer to midnight 23:59:59 AoE.

Reviewing Process

Evaluation Criteria
The evaluation criteria include the following aspects:

• Clarity of the paper
• Novelty of the contribution
• Relevance to software visualization, evolution, or maintenance
• Soundness of the methodology
• Quality of evaluation (if applicable)
• Open science and ability to replicate*

* VEM 2023 encourages authors to make their artifacts open and accessible for the sake of good science. Papers will not be rejected if authors do not follow the recommendation of disclosing artifacts, but doing so might be one (but not the only one) positive factor for reviewers to recommend acceptance.

Double-Blind Review Process
VEM 2023 will employ a double-blind review process. Both the authors and the reviewers must make every effort to honor the double-blind review process. Authors should check the submission guidelines below. Reviewers should not search for the title of the submitted papers on the Internet nor try to deduce the authors of the papers.

Submission Guidelines

Papers can be written in Portuguese or English (Portuguese papers do not need an English abstract). Submissions in English are strongly encouraged so that your research can be accessed by non-Portuguese speaking researchers.

Submissions must be no longer than 5 pages, including all text, tables, figures, appendices, and references. All papers must be submitted in PDF Format and formatted with the ACM 2-column conference format available at ACM template for VEM. LaTeX users must use the sample-vem.tex file as the main.tex file. Word users should use interim-layout-vem.docx.

Submissions must not reveal the authors' identities for the double-blind review process. In particular, the authors’ names and affiliations must be omitted on the title page and headers of the paper, and references to their prior work should be in the third person. If you want to make available any artifact in time for submission, please make it anonymous. There are existing tools for doing that easily. For instance, Anonymous GitHub is an open-source tool that helps you quickly double-blind GitHub repositories. VEM encourages authors to make artifacts publicly available. If the authors want to do so but do not want to take the risk to break the double-blind review process, they are invited to add the artifacts' links in the camera-ready versions in case of paper acceptance.

Papers must be submitted electronically through JEMS. Submitted papers must be unpublished and should not be under review elsewhere.

If you have any doubts about the preparation of your manuscript, please do not hesitate to send an email to vemworkshop@gmail.com.