Topics of Interest

We welcome submissions on a broad range of topics related to software visualization, evolution, and maintenance, including but not limited to:

• AI for Software Engineering and Software Engineering for AI (see note below);
• Automation of software engineering tasks with LLM and other foundational models (e.g., vision models)
• AI-assisted software design and architecture
• 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
• Prompt engineering for software engineering
• Software analytics
• Software architecture
• Software engineering and data science
• 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 involving AI must either (a) concern a software system as a whole, or a subsystem, and not simply its AI or ML component, (b) consider software engineering artifacts, (c) target a novel context for a software engineering task, or (d) study human, social, socio-technical, and organizational aspects in the development of AI-intensive software systems (see also “Scoping Software Engineering for AI: The TSE Perspective", 10.1109/TSE.2024.3470368). Other papers may fit more AI- or ML-specialized venues instead.

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 2025 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 2025 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 2025 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.

All papers must describe unpublished work that is not currently submitted for publication elsewhere. We are accepting the following types of submissions:

• Full Research Papers (8-10 pages + 2 for references): These are original high-quality technical papers on software visualization, evolution, and maintenance.


• Short Papers (5 pages + 1 for references): These papers may describe work in progress, challenges, innovations, or research perspectives.


• Data and Tool Papers (5 pages + 1 for references): These papers may describe datasets or tools built by the authors that can be used by other practitioners or researchers. The dataset or tool should be made available on a persistent repository at the time of submission of the paper for review, but will be considered confidential until publication of the paper.

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.

Regarding the Use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) or AI-assisted Technologies in Research Papers

By submitting papers to VEM 2025, authors acknowledge that they comply with the Generative AI usage policy, based on existing policies proposed by IEEE, ACM, and Springer.

Prohibited:

• Listing generative AI tools and technologies, such as ChatGPT, as authors of papers.
• Using articles or sections entirely produced by generative AI tools.

Allowed (with explicit mention in acknowledgments):

• Using generative AI tools to create content, with mention in the acknowledgments section of the paper indicating what was generated and which tool was used. It is important to verify the terms of use of the tool, and such verification is the responsibility of the authors. For instance, in the acknowledgments: ChatGPT was used to generate the first paragraph of Section 3 and to create Table 3.2.

Allowed (without the need for mention):

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

Presentation and Publication

Upon notification of acceptance, the authors of accepted papers will be asked to prepare their camera-ready versions. At least one author of each accepted paper is expected to register and present the paper at the VEM 2025 workshop. All accepted and presented papers will be published in the workshop electronic proceedings, available in the SBC OpenLib (SOL) digital library.

Best Papers Award

Outstanding papers will be announced during the workshop. Their authors will be invited to submit an extended version in English to the Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development (JSERD).

Program Committee Co-Chairs

• Bruno Cafeo (Unicamp)
• Juliana Pereira (PUC-Rio)

Program Committee

TBD