icse-workflow

ICSE Workflow

An ICSE campaign is a ten-month pipeline with one entrance. The 2027 cycle (checked 2026-07-08 against the official dates pages) runs a single submission cycle — a change from the two-cycle 2025/2026 model — so a missed June deadline costs a full year, and the calendar below is the whole game.

The 2027-cycle master calendar

Artifact-evaluation and camera-ready dates for 2027 were not posted at check time; the 2026 edition ran artifact registration/submission in early January, which is the planning anchor until real dates appear.

Working backward from June 30

A credible empirical-SE paper cannot be compressed into deadline month, because its long poles — subject recruitment, benchmark construction, multi-week tool runs, qualitative coding with a second rater — do not parallelize late. Plan backward:

Jun 30  freeze: PDF + anonymized replication package
Jun 16  full internal mock review against the four criteria
Jun 02  results complete; threats-to-validity written from real limitations
May 05  evaluation running at scale; paper skeleton has real numbers
Apr 07  study design locked (RQs, baselines, metrics, subjects); pilot done
Mar 2026 and earlier: idea vetted with icse-topic-selection; related work swept

The two dates authors most often plan around wrongly: the abstract deadline is mandatory (June 23 — a week before the paper, not a formality), and the response window is September, which lands in teaching-start season for most groups — reserve the days now.

Role assignments that prevent deadline-week chaos

• Evidence owner — benchmarks, baselines, statistics; owns Jun 2 freeze.
• Artifact owner — replication package, anonymization, availability statement; owns the link that goes in the paper.
• Prose owner — the 10-page budget, the threats section, the criterion self-audit.
• Process owner — HotCRP fields, conflicts, abstract registration, calendar of every date above in the group calendar with AoE conversions.

One person can hold two hats; no hat may be unheld.

Branch plans after October 20

• Accept: artifact-evaluation submission (badges are opt-in and post-acceptance), camera-ready with the extra page, Dublin logistics.
• Major Revision: the November sprint is pre-planned before October — which experiments could be extended, which machines are free in November. Groups that first think about feasibility on notification day lose a week of the four.
• Reject: reroute within weeks, not months. FSE and ASE deadlines typically land in spring/summer, ISSTA in autumn/winter; TSE/TOSEM/EMSE take extended versions year-round, and a journal acceptance can return to the ICSE stage via journal-first (2027 window: papers accepted Oct 11, 2025 – Oct 10, 2026 at TSE/TOSEM/EMSE). Check each venue's live dates — sibling calendars move annually.

Cadence between milestones

The calendar above names endpoints; groups that hit them run a steady between-milestone cadence: a weekly claims-vs-evidence review from April (which headline claim is still unevidenced, who unblocks it), a biweekly package build so the artifact never diverges more than two weeks from the paper, and a standing "deadline minus 14" rehearsal where the current draft is mock-reviewed against the four criteria by someone outside the author list. The mock review is the cheapest Major-Revision insurance available: it finds the missing-baseline and boilerplate-threats objections while there is still a month to fix them rather than four weeks in November.

Cycle-volatility warnings

• The single-cycle structure itself is the newest variable: 2025/2026 ran two cycles, 2027 runs one. Verify the cycle count first each year, because it changes every downstream date and the rerouting math.
• Response format, artifact deadlines, camera-ready dates, and registration rules were all unposted for 2027 at check time — 待核实 before promising them to coauthors.
• Do not let old two-cycle advice ("resubmit to cycle 2") leak into planning; that lane does not exist in 2027.

Output format

[Cycle position] months to next ICSE deadline; feasible? yes/no
[Backward plan] dated milestones from today to freeze
[Owners] evidence / artifact / prose / process
[Branch readiness] MR sprint pre-plan? reroute venue + date named?
[Calendar risks] deadlines colliding with teaching/travel; AoE conversions done