Call for Doctoral Symposium Papers

Context

The SPLC Doctoral Symposium aims to provide a supportive environment that enables doctoral students to get constructive feedback on their research. Students will discuss their work with experienced community members and other students. The event is open to any PhD student whose research topic concerns software variability. As opposed to recent years, we also welcome PhD students early in their research, even if they do not have results yet, provided they have set up a research program. Thus, we will consider the ‘early’ and ‘late’ categories of submissions. To accommodate various PhD durations (e.g., 6-year assistantship in Belgium, part-time with industry) we do not put constraints on what early and late mean regarding the number of years in the PhD program.

 Important Dates

  • Doctoral symposium submission: 12/06/2025
  • Doctoral symposium notification: 03/07/2025
  • Camera-ready: 10/07/2025

Submissions/Publishing

Requirements

To participate, students should prepare a research plan answering the following questions:

  • The research problem being addressed and its importance
  • The research methodology and techniques being applied
  • The solution being proposed, its novelty and validity
  • The relation of the work with the state-of-the-art

The research plan aims to provide clear material that can be used as a basis for guidance and discussion. Students in the early stages of their research may have more difficulty answering these points but should try their best.  It is strongly recommended that students discuss the research plan with their supervisors.

The following structure is recommended:

  • Front matter: Title, your name, email address, abstract
  • Introduction and Motivation: Introduction, description of the problem tackled and its importance; what the literature says about this problem and where existing work fails; how you plan to tackle this problem; what results you envision; how you plan to validate your solution.
  • Research Questions: Clearly state the research questions you plan to address and any assumptions you make.
  • Research Methodology and Approach: The research methodology you plan to use (e.g., design science, action research), including the techniques you plan to use (e.g., formalisation, algorithm specification, case studies). In line with your research methodology, describe your research approach: what novel methods and/or technology you are going to build, how you are going to do that, including aspects such as data collection, software prototyping and evaluation. Discuss any threats to validity you can envision and expect to address (to the extent possible).
  • Preliminary Results: Overview of the results you achieved so far. Provide an example to explain how the solution obtained so far works. This is only applicable to the ‘late’ category.
  • Work plan: Both categories of submissions should consider an overall work plan for the whole thesis. Submissions for the ‘late’ category can mention which parts of the work plan they have reached so far. Both categories of submissions should consider the schedule for the next 12 months.

Submission format

Submissions should be in the ACM format (please see the information about the format in the call for the research track). All submissions must be in English, in PDF format, and neither contain proprietary or confidential material. The page limits for doctoral symposium submissions are as follows:

  • Early category: 4 pages (+2 pages for references only)
  • Late category: 6 pages (+2 pages for references only)

Submissions should be sent as a single file via Easychair track Doctoral Symposium: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=splc2025 (please select ‘SPLC 2025 – Doctoral Symposium’ track first.

\documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart} 
\acmConference[SPLC'25]{29th International Systems and Software Product Line Conference}{September 01--September 05, 2025}{A Coruña, Spain}

Evaluation

At least two reviewers will evaluate each submission according to the research’s relevance, originality and feasibility.

SPLC DS papers will be published in one of the volumes of the SPLC conference proceedings published by ACM Digital Library.

The author of the accepted submission must register and attend SPLC 2025 so that the submission can be published.

Format of the Symposium

The symposium will be held in conjunction with SPLC 2025. In addition to presentations by PhD students and discussions, the doctoral symposium will feature a keynote and ask-me-anything sessions with experienced researchers . All students are expected to attend every symposium session.

Chairs

 

Gilles Perrouin
University of Namur, Belgium
Sophie Fortz
King’s College London, United Kingdom

 

Program Committee

TBA