issta-writing-style
Use when revising an ISSTA paper for a clear testing/analysis contribution, covering the threat-model-then-technique structure, the evaluation contract, a threats-to-validity section that is not boilerplate, claims scoped to the subjects tested, double-anonymous phrasing, and 18-page ACM sigconf discipline that survives specialist reviewers.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill issta-writing-style --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.
# ISSTA Writing Style Use this when revising the main paper. An ISSTA paper has to state, early and precisely, what software behaviour it finds or reasons about, on what it was evaluated, and what the evidence showed — to a reviewer who already knows the nearest tool and benchmark. ## Revision rules - Put the contribution on the first page: the problem in a concrete testing/analysis setting, why existing techniques miss it, the technique, and what the evaluation showed. Name the technique; do not hide it behind "a novel approach." - State the threat model or analysis scope before the technique. Reviewers judge soundness against the scope you set, so an unstated scope is an unbounded claim they will puncture. - Make the evaluation a contract: subjects, baselines, metric, and statistic, declared before the numbers. "Outperforms prior work" without that contract is the single most common weak sentence. - Pair every claim with evidence: a table, a benchmark result, an artifact path, or a scoped limitation. A declarative sentence near a result is something a specialist reviewer will check. - Write a real threats-to-validity section: internal (confounds in the measurement), external (do
- Revision rules
- Contribution-presentation discipline
- Sentence-level rewrites
- Vignette: compressing into 18 ACM pages
- What a strong ISSTA opening does
- Output format
What does the issta-writing-style skill do?
Use when revising an ISSTA paper for a clear testing/analysis contribution, covering the threat-model-then-technique structure, the evaluation contract, a threats-to-validity section that is not boilerplate, claims scoped to the subjects tested, double-anonymous phrasing, and 18-page ACM sigconf discipline that survives specialist reviewers.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill issta-writing-style --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 909 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.