ICSE 2025 and co-located CHASE 2025, held at Ottawa, were full of energy, excellent research, meaningful conversations about the present and future of Software Engineering, and catching up with old and meeting new friends. Below I recall key highlights from the experience across the week, including some reflections on how we can improve even more as a community.
Sunday-Monday: CHASE 2025
From being a first time PhD student at CHASE 2010 when it used to be a workshop to serving as the Program Co-Chair in 2021 with Fabian Fagerholm and now as General Chair for CHASE 2025 as a co-located conference at ICSE, it has been a special journey of 15 years! After over an year of planning and organising, it was a pleasure to see the CHASE 2025 conference come alive at ICSE 2025. Together with Program Co-chairs Ronnie De Souza Santos and Bianca Trinkenreich and the entire OC team, we enjoyed:
- hosting two days of excellent human and socio-technical aspects research in software engineering
- celebrating distinguished award paper and reviewers
- listening to two excellent keynotes by Alexander Serebrenik (Sunday) and Margaret-Anne Storey (Monday)
- watching the next generation of CHASErs flourish in the Doctoral and Early Career Symposium (DECS) organised by Yvonne Dittrich and Irum Rauf (see DECS “madness” presentations queue photo)
- launching my book “Qualitative Research with Socio-Technical Grounded Theory” at CHASE – such a special experience!
- hosting joint dinner evening with our friends from the #TechDebt2025 conference at Nostalgica Cafe.
Special thanks to Lavinia Paganini for capturing the moments on camera and sharing them on socials, and to our organising committee, program committee, and attendees.
ICSE and CHASE are where I have found my tribe – hope all our attendees did too. Thank you for making it a meaningful experience for everyone, and look forward to CHASE 2026 at ICSE 2026 in Rio!
Tuesday: Doctoral Symposium, EDI Panel, RAIE talk, ICSE Steering Committee
- Listening to and providing feedback to PhDs is something I always look forward to! It was great to hear about the works of four PhD students working on the human aspects of SE at the Doctoral Symposium, followed by asking them questions and providing feedback on their research topics and designs. Thanks Alexander Serebrenik and Tayana Conte for the invitation!
- I presented our experience report “Raising AI Ethics Awareness” on behalf of the team – Dr Aastha Pant and Dr Paul McIntosh – at the RAIE workshop, highlighting the importance of raising AI ethics awareness amongst practitioners using engaging approaches such as quizzes and discussions.
- We engaged in some hard hitting conversation on EDI at the “EDI in AI” Panel at the Responsible AI Engineering (RAIE) workshop at ICSE, organised by colleagues from CSIRO, Australia. It was a pleasure to share the stage with Daniel Amyot and Ronnie De Souza Santos to answer the questions posed by the host Muneera Bano and the audience. My key takeaway: acknowledge the challenges and move forward with proactive action!
- I attended my first ICSE steering committee meeting over a working dinner. It lasted ~4.5 hours 🙂 We discussed key matters affecting the community such as sustainability and plans for ICSE 2026 (Rio), 2027 (Ireland), 2028 (Hawaii), and a pitch for 2029.
Wednesday: David Parnas Keynote, two Tech Briefings, ICSE2026 OC Lunch meeting
- Most keynotes make you think. Some make you think again and again. David Parnas challenged how we define, consider, implement and research AI as the SE community. Slide deck available here. Videos of all keynotes are available on the ICSE YouTube channel.
- Presenting the 90 mins technical briefing on “Qualitative Research and Qualitative Data Analysis” was fun, with an engaged audience of 50+ folks (all new except one person who had attended a TB I gave at a previous ICSE). I also gave out a free copy of my book as promised through the giveaway at the TB. The copy went to Karina Kohl from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
- Co-presenting a second 90 mins technical briefing on “Mixed methods research” with Margaret-Anne Storey, Teresa Baldassarre, and Alessandra Milani was special. After working on this mind bending exercise to define and discuss MMR for the SE community together for over 2.5 years, it was truly special to present the TB together. We had a packed house of over 60+ folks in the audience, actively engaged in the content and discussions. The MMR paper is available on arxiv and accepted to Empirical Software Engineering journal.
- In between the two TBs, I attended the ICSE 2026 Organising Committee lunch meeting. ICSE 2026 will be in Rio, Brazil for the first time . I am so excited to be co-chairing the Software Engineering in Practice (SEIP) track with Gustavo Pinto. Call for papers will be released soon!
Thursday: ICSE 2027 OC brekkie meeting, Human Aspects, TSE Editorial Board, Future of SE panel, ICSE Town Hall, Banquet
- ICSE2027 will be held in Dublin, Ireland. It was lovely to share the breakfast organised for the organising committee by the Co-Chairs Brian Fitzgerald and Liliana Pasquale. Together, the OC discussed logistics, tracks, publications, local arrangements, and much more. I will serving as the EDI co-chair along with Anthony Ventresque.
- At the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) editorial board meeting over lunch, we discussed key items such as defining significance, improving the review experience, sharing our challenges and strategies of working at Associate Editors for the TSE.
- The Future of SE panel bought up the good, bad, and ugly of what’s next to come.
- The ICSE Town Hall saw many topics of concern to the community being discussed including possible ways to connect the three key conferences ICSE, FSE, and ASE better, offering authors more flexibility in what to attend.
- The First Nations dance at the Banquet was a treat! It is heart warming to see Indigenous peoples being respected and celebrated around the world, whether its in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Featured in the photo is a traditional ‘rain dance’ experience at the ICSE Banquet.
Friday: 50yrs of ICSE, Human Aspects, Sustainability keynote, SEIP Tips, EDI Talk at SEIS, Goodbyes
- The day started with celebrating 50 years of ICSE where current and previous 5 years’ OC members (who were there) joined up on stage to mark this occasion.
- The ICSE Keynote on Sustainability by Patricia Lago was a delight to soak into! Patricia specially called out the need for more human aspects research into the area of software sustainability.
- Huge thanks to Ciera Jaspan and Rick Kazman for sharing their experiences of co-chairing the SEIP track at ICSE2025 – I learned a lot and hope to make the track a success at ICSE2026 with my co-chair Gustavo Pinto.
- Muneera and I presented our paper “What does a Software Engineer look like: Societal Biases in LLMs” in the SE in Society (SEIS) track of ICSE. It was such fun conceptualising, conducting, and writing up this work with Muneera and Hashini Gunatilake (HumaniSE lab, Monash University). Great audience engagement and questions, even though it was one of the last slots in the program. This research was supported by Monash Information Technology‘s #EDI portfolio.
- Current and ex- folks from the Faculty of IT at Monash University met up at ICSE. We managed to get a picture of some of us 🙂
- Finally, it was time to say goodbyes to colleagues, students, and friends – old and new – as we all look forward to the next ICSE and CHASE 2026 in Rio!
Inclusion at ICSE
Whether it was inclusive food options (veg, vegan, halal, gluten free etc), on-site childcare, dedicated prayer room and quiet room, or the conscious efforts to promoting sustainability, ICSE 2025 excelled in inclusive and responsible practices. Something future ICSE’s will have to work hard to maintain as a standard!
What we can do better
While our community has an overwhelmingly positive culture, I can think of three areas of improvement:
- We should be very careful in the delivery of our feedback. Especially as experienced members of the community, it is our responsibility to build up the next generation. While we do not want to all wear rose-tinted glasses and squash any criticism, how and where feedback is provided can be given more thought. For example, some conversations can be taken offline over tea/coffee and feedback can be provided in more constructive ways. It costs us nothing to share a good word of encouragement but it can go a long way in shaping people’s experience of the community and boosting their confidence in their own abilities. Reminds me of the saying, “in a world where you can be anything, be kind.”
- We should consciously avoid giving into casual ageism (and other ‘isms’ for that matter). Every ‘young’ looking person (especially woman) is not a student. I have learned to avoid making such assumptions over the years. Don’t assume, ask politely what people do, what excites them, what’s the next cool thing they are working on. If they ‘look’ young for their role, ask them about their journey and be happy for them knowing they must have worked really hard to get there.
- Finally, more diversity on the main panels on the program, both in terms of gender and geographic location (e.g., beyond the USA), would be great to see the future!
Rashina Hoda 