Call for Papers — EMSE Special Issue for the “International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER 2025)”

A special issue of the Empirical Software Engineering Journal.

Editors of the Special Issue

Maria Teresa Baldassarre, (University of Bari, Italy), mariateresa.baldassarre@uniba.it;
Masud Rahman, (Dalhousie University, Canada), masud.rahman@dal.ca.

Description of the Special Issue

Software analysis, evolution, and reengineering encompass the theory and practice of recovering information from existing software and systems, the exploration of innovative methods to extract the many kinds of information that can be recovered from software, software engineering documents, and systems artifacts, and the examination of innovative ways of using this information in system renewal and program understanding.

The special issue invites submissions on novel and innovative research results and industrial experience papers in the area of software analysis, evolution, and reengineering. We especially encourage the submissions of extended papers from the 32nd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER 2025).

The evaluation of papers will be based on the following:

Underlying methodological soundness and rigour;
Novelty of the work;
The quality of the reporting;
Strength of empirical evaluation/basis;
Significance and reproducibility of the results.

Submission Topics

AI for Software Engineering;
Software Engineering for AI;
Generative AI and LLM;
Software Tools for Software Evolution and Maintenance;
Software Analysis, Parsing, and Fact Extraction;
Software Reverse Engineering and Reengineering;
Program Comprehension;
Software Evolution Analysis;
Software Architecture Recovery and Reverse Architecting;
Program Transformation and Refactoring;
Mining Software Repositories and Software Analytics;
Software Visualization;
Software Reconstruction and Migration;
Software Maintenance and Evolution;
Program Repair;
Software Release Engineering, Continuous Integration and Delivery;
Empirical studies on all the above topics;
Education related to all of the above topics;
Legal aspects.

Schedule

Submission Deadline: September 30, 2025
First Round Review Due: January 19, 2026
Author Revision Due: April 19, 2026

Submission Instructions

Papers should be submitted through the Empirical Software Engineering editorial manager website (http://www.editorialmanager.com/emse/) as follows (1) select “Research Papers” and (2) later on the Additional Information page:

Answer “Yes” to “Does this paper belong to a special issue?”
And select “SANER-2025” for “Please select the issue your manuscript belongs to”.
In the cover letter, please explicitly explain why the submission fits with the special issue and, in case of extensions, what is the additional research with respect to the conference version.

For formatting guidelines as well as submission instructions, visit http://www.springer.com/computer/swe/journal/10664?detailsPage=pltci_2530593