RENE Track - Call for Papers

The 26th edition of the International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER’19) would like to encourage the submission of articles (1) reproducing results from previous papers and (2) reporting important and relevant negative or null results (results which fail to show an effect, yet demonstrate the research paths that did not pay off).

*Reproducibility studies: The papers in this category must go beyond simply re-implementing an algorithm and/or re-running the artifacts provided by the original paper. Such submissions should apply the approach on at least a partially new data sets (open-source or proprietary). This also means that it is possible to use available infrastructures to conduct measurements and experiments but with different/extended datasets and different conditions, scenarios, etc.


A reproducibility study should clearly report on results that the authors were able to reproduce as well as on the aspects of the work that were irreproducible.

*Negative results papers: We seek papers that report on negative results. We seek negative results for all types of software engineering research in any empirical area (qualitative, quantitative, case study, experiment, etc.). For example, did your controlled experiment on the value of dual monitors in pair programming not show an improvement over single monitors? Even if negative, results obtained are still valuable when they are either not obvious or disprove widely accepted wisdom. As Walter Tichy writes, “Negative results, if trustworthy, are extremely important for narrowing down the search space. They eliminate useless hypotheses and thus reorient and speed up the search for better approaches.”


Evaluation Criteria

Both Reproducibility Studies and Negative Results submissions will be evaluated according to the following standards:

  • Depth and breadth of the empirical studies
  • Clarity of writing
  • Appropriateness of conclusions
  • Amount of useful, actionable insights
  • Deep discussion regarding the implications of the negative results or new results obtained with reproducibility studies
  • Availability of artifacts
  • Underlying methodological rigor and detailed description of procedures. For example, a negative result due primarily to misaligned expectations or due to lack of statistical power (small samples) is not a good submission. The negative result should be a result of a lack of effect, not lack of methodological rigor.
  • Clear descriptions of the differences between the original setup and the one used in the study (for the case of reproducibility studies).
  • Most importantly, we expect reproducibility studies to clearly point out the artifacts the study is built upon, and to provide the links to all the artifacts in the submission (the only exception will be given to those papers that reproduce the results on proprietary datasets that can not be publicly released).
Submission Instructions

Submissions must be original, in the sense that the findings and writing have not been previously published or under consideration elsewhere. However, as either reproducibility studies or negative results, some overlap with previous work is expected. Please make that clear in the paper.

Publication format should follow the SANER guidelines. Choose “RENE:Replication” or “RENE:NegativeResult” as the submission type.

Length: Reproducibility studies and descriptions of negative results will have a length of 10 pages including references.

Important note: the RENE track of SANER 2019 DOES NOT FOLLOW a double-blind review process.

Important Dates