icsme-topic-selection

ICSME Topic Selection

Decide the venue before drafting. ICSME — the IEEE International Conference on Software

Maintenance and Evolution — is the field's dedicated home for what happens to software after

the first release: maintaining it, evolving it, comprehending it, refactoring it, repaying its

technical debt, and mining the repositories that record its history. A brilliant paper about a

greenfield synthesis technique, a novel type system, or a pure ML model is respected and then

rejected as out of scope. The ICSME question is not "is this good SE?" but **"is the paper's

centre of gravity a real maintenance-or-evolution problem?"**

The routing question that matters most

ICSME overlaps ICSE and FSE (both take maintenance work) and SANER, SCAM, MSR, and ICPC (all

maintenance-adjacent). The decisive test is which community the paper is arguing with and

how central the maintenance lifecycle is to the contribution — plus which live deadline fits.

A paper whose evidence is a legacy system aging under change, a refactoring that developers must

trust, or a bug that survived years of evolution is natively ICSME; a paper that only uses

software as a substrate for a general technique usually belongs elsewhere.

Sibling-venue routing table

| Signal in your project | Better home | Why |

|---|---|---|

| Maintenance/evolution problem is the heart: aging systems, change impact, technical debt, refactoring safety, program comprehension | ICSME | The venue built for the post-release lifecycle |

| Broad SE technique or study aimed at the whole field, not specifically maintenance | ICSE / ESEC/FSE | General-SE flagships with wider scope and a larger stage |

| The whole method is repository mining and the research question is about mining itself | MSR | Purpose-built mining venue (ICSME takes mining applied to maintenance) |

| Static/dynamic source-code analysis or transformation is the core machinery | SCAM | Co-located with ICSME; deeper source-analysis expertise |

| Reverse engineering / comprehension with a strong tooling or human angle, early-stage | SANER / ICPC | Evolution-adjacent siblings with their own communities |

| Testing depth or fault detection is the contribution | ISSTA / ASE | Testing/analysis and automation venues |

| Study too long or too deep for the 10-page IEEE budget | TSE / EMSE | Journals with no conference ceiling — and the door back via ICSME's Journal-First track |

Contribution shapes ICSME rewards

• Maintenance/evolution technique + tool + evaluation on real, evolving systems — a change-

impact, refactoring, migration, comprehension, or debt-detection technique, embodied in a tool

and evaluated on real systems with real change history.

• Empirical study of how software ages and changes — mining commit, issue, PR, or release

history to characterize maintenance practice, defect survival, debt accumulation, or evolution.

• Reverse engineering / program comprehension — recovering architecture, models, or intent

from existing code, with evidence it helps a maintainer.

• Replication or negative result (the RENE track's home turf) — re-running prior maintenance

research on new data and reporting honestly what did and did not reproduce.

• Technical-debt and refactoring economics — measuring, predicting, or repaying debt, or

demonstrating that a refactoring preserves behaviour and pays off.

The re-label and lifecycle tests

Two quick tests sharpen a borderline verdict:

• Lifecycle test: does the contribution only make sense because software *already exists and

keeps changing*? If you can restate it with no reference to history, maintenance, or evolution,

ICSME is probably the wrong room — route to ICSE/FSE or a technique venue.

• Re-label test: could this be submitted to MSR or SCAM unchanged and read as native there? If

its heart is mining-for-its-own-sake or source transformation machinery, route accordingly;

ICSME rewards the maintenance payoff of that machinery, not the machinery alone.

Choosing an ICSME track (not just the research track)

ICSME is unusual in how many doors it opens — pick the one that fits the work's maturity:

[Research track]      a complete maintenance/evolution technique or study, ready now
[Journal-First (J1C2)] a TSE/EMSE paper already accepted (2025-2026 window) not yet conf-presented
[Registered Reports]  a strong protocol whose result is not yet in -> lock the method, review-first
[RENE]                a replication/reproduction on new data, or an honest negative result
[NIER / Visions]      an early idea with an argument but not a full study
[Tool Demo / Data]    a usable tool or a released dataset as the contribution
[Industry]            a practitioner-driven maintenance experience report

Cheap reconnaissance before committing

[Scope]   scan the last two ICSME programs (dblp conf/icsm, conf.researchr.org) for your subarea
          -> 3+ recent papers = a reviewer pool exists; 0 = opening or mismatch
[Citations] is your bibliography majority maintenance/evolution venues (ICSME/SANER/MSR/ICPC/TSE/EMSE)?
          -> majority elsewhere => reviewers read you as a visitor; ground the intro in maintenance first
[Calendar] compare the next ICSME abstract deadline with ICSE/FSE/SANER/journal dates -> route to the
          nearest honest fit rather than idling a year

Decision procedure

[Audience] who acts differently if the claim holds? -> maintainers/reverse-engineers/evolution researchers?
[Claim type] technique / empirical / comprehension / replication / debt-economics
[Lifecycle check] does it depend on software already existing and changing? -> yes = ICSME-shaped
[Sibling check] mining-only -> MSR; source transformation -> SCAM; general SE -> ICSE/FSE
[Track choice] research / journal-first / registered report / RENE / NIER / tool-demo / industry
[Verdict] ICSME <track> / sibling venue / journal-first, with a one-line reason

Run this before the writing skills; a wrong venue or wrong-track decision wastes every later step.

When the verdict is ICSME, continue with icsme-workflow for the calendar and

icsme-writing-style for the paper shape.