icsme-writing-style

ICSME Writing Style

Use this when revising the main paper. ICSME papers are read by maintenance and evolution

empiricists, so they need a software-maintenance contribution stated on the first page and

evidence a reviewer trusts. The failure this skill prevents is a technically fine paper that reads

like a greenfield systems demo or a generic ML result with a maintenance title glued on — the

icsme-topic-selection re-route signal.

Revision rules

• Lead with the maintenance/evolution problem: the situation a maintainer recognizes (a system

aging under change, debt accruing, a refactoring nobody trusts, comprehension lost over years),

why the current state is inadequate, the contribution, the evidence, and what changes for people

who maintain software.

• State research questions as contracts. Each RQ names what is measured and how it will be

judged; every RQ is answered explicitly in the results, and no result exists without an RQ it

serves.

• Pair every claim with proportional evidence — real evolving subject systems, a fair baseline,

a statistic with an effect size, or a qualitative code with agreement — not adjectives.

• Argue threats to validity; do not recite them. Name the construct, internal, external, and

conclusion threats that actually bite this maintenance study (mining confounds, survivorship in

change history, one-ecosystem generalization) and say what you did to bound each.

• Respect the 10-page budget as a design constraint. The IEEEtran two-column limit counts

figures, tables, and appendices; a study that only fits by shrinking threats or method is

over-scoped for the venue.

• Maintain double-anonymity in self-citations, tool names, the choice of your own system as a

subject, acknowledgements, funding, and data-availability wording.

Maintenance/evolution paper skeleton

| Section | Job it must do | Common failure |

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

| Intro | Maintenance problem, inadequacy, contribution, evidence preview, payoff — first page | Leads with a technology trend, not a maintenance pain |

| Background/Motivation | Why a maintainer or the evolution literature needs this now | Motivation by assertion, no grounding in practice |

| Approach / Study design | The technique or the RQs + mining/analysis protocol, reproducibly | Method too thin to re-run on other histories |

| Evaluation | Each RQ answered with proportional evidence on real systems | Metrics that proxy for the maintenance outcome |

| Threats to validity | The threats that bite this history/corpus, each bounded | Generic list untethered from this study |

| Related work | Delta-first positioning against the evolution literature | Catalog of citations with no contrast |

Sentence-level rewrites

| Draft pattern | ICSME-safe rewrite |

|---|---|

| "Our tool significantly improves maintainability." | "reduces change-impact set size by X% (95% CI ...) vs. <baseline> on <N evolving systems>" |

| "We study a large software corpus." | "We mine <N> projects sampled by <criterion> over <time window>, listed in the artifact" |

| "Results show our refactoring is safe." | "RQ2: behaviour-preservation held on <fraction> of applications; threats in §5.2" |

| "State-of-the-art performance." | Claim scoped to the systems, change history, and metrics actually studied |

| "Developers understood the code better." | "comprehension-task accuracy rose from X to Y (effect size ...) in the study" |

Threats-to-validity discipline

[Construct]   does the metric measure the maintenance outcome you claim? (e.g. churn as a proxy for effort)
[Internal]    could something other than your technique explain it? (confounds in change history, tuning)
[External]    to which systems/languages/domains/histories does the finding generalize?
[Conclusion]  are the statistics appropriate; survivorship handled; multiple comparisons corrected?
-> for each that bites: state it, then state the mitigation, next to the affected result

Vignette: compressing a mining study into 10 pages

A draft with three RQs, nine figures, and a sprawling background on version-control internals: keep

all three RQ answers, the two figures that carry the headline evolution findings, and a threats

subsection per RQ; move the full per-project breakdown, the mining pipeline diagram, and secondary

plots to the artifact with explicit forward references; cut background to what the argument needs.

The test of a good cut: a reviewer should be able to answer "what did each RQ find about how this

software evolves, and what threatens it?" from the 10 pages alone.

Output format

[Writing diagnosis] clear / under-motivated / over-claimed / evidence-mismatched / over-scoped
[First-page fix] <new framing leading with the maintenance/evolution contribution>
[RQ audit] <RQ -> metric -> where answered -> proportional? yes/no>
[Threats fix] <threat that bites this history/corpus -> mitigation to add, placed by the result>
[Anonymity edits] <tool names / self-citations / own-system subject / links to rewrite>