ICSE [1] and FSE [2] are the top software engineering research conferences. Skimming the titles/abstracts of their papers each year doesn't take long.

Also, they generally have industry or "in practice" tracks that have postmortems from the big software companies in case you want something more applied.

[1] http://2016.icse.cs.txstate.edu/

[2] http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/fse2016/