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issta-workflow

Productivity
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Use when planning an ISSTA project timeline from venue fit through the January research-paper deadline, the March author response, the April first decision, the May Major-Revision sprint, the June final decision, artifact evaluation, and the October symposium, with backward-planning offsets for a testing/analysis tool paper and its artifact.

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Source SKILL.md: https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills/blob/HEAD/ISSTA-Skills/skills/issta-workflow/SKILL.md

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ISSTA Workflow

Use this as the project-management skill for an ISSTA submission. Replace every date below with the current official timetable and work backward from the HotCRP deadline — ISSTA's calendar, and even its number of deadlines, changes between editions.

ISSTA is a conference, not a journal: it has no standing editor-in-chief and no article-processing charge. The rotating leadership is the per-edition General Chair and Program Chairs, appointed by ACM SIGSOFT and turning over each year, and the cost model is registration, not APCs — proceedings appear in the ACM Digital Library. Re-check the current organization page rather than carrying a name forward.

Milestones (2026 shape — verify the current cycle)

  • Venue fit: confirm the contribution is genuinely testing-and-analysis, not a broader SE result.
  • Evidence lock: freeze the technique's scope, the subjects and benchmark versions, the baselines, and the artifact plan.
  • Submission deadline (Jan 29, 2026): HotCRP record complete, 18-page anonymous sigconf PDF uploaded, subjects pinned.
  • Author response (Mar 24-26, 2026): rebuttal anchored in submitted evidence.
  • First decision (Apr 16, 2026): Accept, Major Revision, or Reject.
  • Major-Revision deadline (May 21, 2026): revised paper plus a ledger walking every reviewer comment.
  • Final decision (Jun 25, 2026): terminal outcome for revised papers.
  • Artifact evaluation: package for the ACM badges and the Zenodo deposit (separate track/dates).
  • Camera-ready and symposium (Oakland, Oct 3-9, 2026): ACM DL package, registration, in-person presentation.

Backward plan from the paper deadline

Weeks out (heuristic)Testing/analysis milestone
10+Technique implemented; scope and threat model fixed
8Subjects and benchmark versions pinned; baselines configured at equal budget
6Full evaluation runs complete with repeated runs and seeds logged
4Statistics done (non-parametric test + effect size); tables generated from logs
3Draft in ACM sigconf; threats-to-validity section written, not stubbed
2Internal mock review by a testing-literate reader; artifact smoke-tested
1Anonymity sweep; HotCRP record; artifact staging anonymized
018-page PDF on HotCRP; confirm the abstract matches

These offsets are planning heuristics only — anchor each to the current official timetable, never to a previous cycle's calendar or deadline count.

Failure modes by stage

  • Treating Major Revision as a soft reject: teams that coast after April lose the June decision they could have won by walking the reviewers' ledger.
  • Deferring the artifact to after acceptance: the badge and Zenodo work is real engineering, and a tool that only ran on the authors' cluster earns nothing.
  • Leaving sigconf reflow to the final week: two-column code listings and full-width tables overflow late.
  • Picking private subjects over an established benchmark: an evaluation that cannot be compared to prior work invites an external-validity reject that no rebuttal fixes.

Coordination notes

  • Assign one owner for the artifact and Zenodo deposit and another for the anonymity sweep; shared ownership is how both slip.
  • Archive the exact submitted PDF and artifact, because response and Major-Revision replies must quote them precisely.

Output format

[Current stage] idea / evaluation / writing / submission / response / major-revision / accepted
[Next official deadline] <date and source, or unknown>
[Critical path] <three tasks that determine readiness>
[Risk register] <page/anonymity/evaluation/baseline/artifact/presentation>
[Owner map] <task -> person or role>