The 42nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2026) is the premier forum for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and challenges in software maintenance and evolution. We invite high-quality submissions describing significant and unpublished results related to, but not limited to, any of the following software maintenance and evolution topics (in alphabetical order):

Change and defect management
Code cloning and provenance
Concept and feature location
Continuous integration/deployment
Empirical studies of software maintenance and evolution
Evolution of non-code artifacts
Evolution and maintenance of AI-based applications
Human factors and social aspects of software maintenance and evolution
Large Language Models for software evolution and maintenance tasks
Maintenance and evolution of model-based methods
Maintenance and evolution of mobile apps
Maintenance and evolution of service-oriented and cloud computing systems
Maintenance and evolution processes
Maintenance versus release process
Mining software repositories
Productivity of software engineers during maintenance and evolution
Release engineering
Reverse engineering and re-engineering
Run-time evolution and dynamic configuration
Software and system comprehension
Software migration and renovation
Software quality assessment
Software refactoring and restructuring
Software testing in the context of software evolution (e.g., regression testing, test optimization/selection, or testing in the context of continuous integration)
Source code analysis and manipulation
Technical Debt

ICSME welcomes innovative ideas that are timely, well-presented, and evaluated. All submissions must position themselves within the existing literature, describe the relevance of the results to specific software engineering goals, and include a clear motivation and presentation of the work. All submissions must be in English and follow the paper submission guidelines below.