Bots (short for software robots) are software applications that perform often repetitive or simple tasks. In particular, social and chat bots interacting with humans are a recent research topic. Similarly, bots can be used to automate many tasks that are performed by software practitioners and teams in their day-to-day work. Recent work argue that bots can save developers' time and significantly increase productivity. Therefore, the goal of this one-day workshop is to bring together software engineering researchers and practitioners to discuss the opportunities and challenges of bots in software engineering. We solicit 6-page work in progress papers, position papers, and experience reports. Work in progress papers are expected to describe new research results and make contributions to the body knowledge in the area. Position papers are expected to discuss controversial issues in the field, or describe interesting or thought provoking ideas that are not yet fully developed. Experience reports are expected to describe experiences with (amongst other things) the development, deployment, and maintenance of bot-based systems in the software engineering domain.We have also included 5-page extended abstract publications free of APC charges that will appear as extended abstracts in the proceedings. All submissions will be reviewed by at least three program committee members. Accepted submissions will be invited to give a talk to present their findings. Submissions may address issues along the general themes, including but not limited, to the following topics:
All deadlines are firm at the Anywhere on Earth (AoE):
Submissions should be made via HotCRP by the submission deadline.
All submissions must be in PDF format and conform, at the time of submission, to the official ACM Primary Article Template, which can be obtained from the
ACM Proceedings Template page.
LaTeX users should use the sigconf option and the review option to produce line numbers for reviewer reference.
The following LaTeX code should be placed at the start of the document:
\documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}
Submissions must not exceed 6 pages, including all text, figures, tables, and appendices; one additional page containing only references is permitted.
By submitting to BoatSE 2026, authors acknowledge awareness and agreement with the
ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism
and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ.
Papers must not have been published or be under review elsewhere during the BoatSE 2026 review process.
Authors should acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the IEEE, submission policy of the IEEE, and the authorship policy of the ACM (and associated FAQ). This includes following these points related to the use of Generative AI: