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icsme-topic-selection

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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.

ICSME-Skills/skills/icsme-topic-selection/SKILL.md

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# 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
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