icsme-topic-selection
Use when deciding whether a software-engineering project belongs at IEEE ICSME (maintenance, evolution, reverse engineering, program comprehension, technical debt, refactoring, mining software repositories) or should be routed to ICSE, FSE, ASE, ISSTA, MSR, SANER, SCAM, or an SE journal (TSE/EMSE), and when to use ICSME's Journal-First, Registered Reports, or RENE tracks instead of the research track.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill icsme-topic-selection --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# 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 gener
- The routing question that matters most
- Sibling-venue routing table
- Contribution shapes ICSME rewards
- The re-label and lifecycle tests
- Choosing an ICSME track (not just the research track)
- Cheap reconnaissance before committing
- Decision procedure
What does the icsme-topic-selection skill do?
Use when deciding whether a software-engineering project belongs at IEEE ICSME (maintenance, evolution, reverse engineering, program comprehension, technical debt, refactoring, mining software repositories) or should be routed to ICSE, FSE, ASE, ISSTA, MSR, SANER, SCAM, or an SE journal (TSE/EMSE), and when to use ICSME's Journal-First, Registered Reports, or RENE tracks instead of the research track.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill icsme-topic-selection --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, a repository with 984 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.