ICSE Topic Selection

Decide venue before writing a single section. ICSE — the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering — is the flagship of the SE research community, which means its reviewer pool expects a contribution to software engineering knowledge, evaluated against the four posted criteria of the research track: novelty, rigor, relevance, and verifiability/transparency (ICSE 2027 CFP wording, checked 2026-07-08). A technically excellent paper whose lesson is about databases, PL semantics, or pure ML will be respected and then rejected as out of scope.

The two-question fit test

1. Who changes their behavior if this paper is right? If the answer names software developers, testers, maintainers, reviewers, build engineers, or SE researchers studying them, ICSE is plausible. If the answer names compiler writers, DB implementers, or ML-architecture designers, route elsewhere.
2. Would an SE empiricist accept the evidence? ICSE's culture demands evidence proportional to the claim: real subject programs or projects, credible baselines, a threats-to-validity analysis, and (by the open-science policy) an inspectable artifact. A motivating anecdote plus a toy prototype fails the rigor criterion regardless of the idea's quality.

Contribution shapes ICSE rewards

• Technique + tool + empirical evaluation — the classic shape: a new analysis, testing, repair, or synthesis technique evaluated on real programs against real baselines (e.g., automated program repair, whose founding ICSE 2009 paper later won the ten-year Most Influential Paper award).
• Empirical study — quantitative mining, controlled experiments, or qualitative interview/survey work that changes what the community believes about practice.
• Human-factors / developer-experience study — how practitioners actually use (or refuse) tools, with sound qualitative methodology.
• SE for AI and AI for SE — testing ML systems, LLM-based SE techniques; the fastest-growing lane, and also the one with the fastest-staling related work.
• Methodology, benchmark, or dataset contributions when they unlock a research area rather than repackage existing data.

Routing table

Timing reality for the current cycle

The ICSE 2027 research-track deadline (abstract June 23, submission June 30, 2026, AoE) has already passed as of 2026-07-08, and the 2027 call posts a single submission cycle — a departure from the two-cycle model ICSE ran in 2025 and 2026. So "just aim for the next ICSE window" now means roughly a year of waiting. That makes routing honesty cheaper than it used to be: FSE, ASE, ISSTA, and the journals all have nearer deadlines, and a journal-first acceptance can still put you on the Dublin stage.

Evidence-maturity ladder

Fit is necessary but not sufficient; the same idea belongs at different ICSE doors depending on how far the evidence has come. Grade honestly:

The costly mismatch is submitting one rung early: research-track reviewers reject prototypes politely ("promising, but..."), and the year lost to a single-cycle calendar is the real price. One rung of patience is usually one rung of acceptance probability.

Anti-patterns that predict rejection

• Venue shopping downward: a paper rejected from a PL or ML venue, resubmitted to ICSE without re-framing for the SE audience. Reviewers detect the foreign citation graph immediately.
• Solution looking for a problem: no evidence any practitioner or researcher has the pain the tool cures — fails the relevance criterion.
• Benchmark-only novelty: a known technique run on a new dataset with no new question answered.
• Scope camouflage: renaming an ML contribution "SE for AI" without any engineering question. Ask: if the model were swapped, would the SE lesson survive?

Reading the room before committing

Two cheap reconnaissance moves sharpen the verdict. First, scan the last two editions' accepted-paper titles (ICSE program pages, dblp) for your exact subarea: three or more recent acceptances means a reviewer pool exists; zero may mean either an opening or a scope mismatch — the exemplars in resources/exemplars/library.md help tell which. Second, check where the papers you cite most were published: if your own bibliography is majority non-SE venues, ICSE reviewers will experience your paper as a visitor, and the introduction must do extra naturalization work before the fit test passes.

Decision procedure

[Audience] who acts differently if the claim is true? -> SE actors? yes/no
[Claim type] technique / empirical / human-factors / benchmark / methodology
[Evidence maturity] complete + real subjects? -> full track
                    promising + partial?      -> NIER or workshop
                    industrial + deployed?    -> SEIP
[Deadline math] next ICSE window vs FSE/ASE/ISSTA/journal calendars
[Verdict] ICSE research track / co-located track / sibling venue + one-line reason

Run this before the writing skills; a wrong venue decision wastes every later step. When the verdict is ICSE, continue with icse-workflow for the calendar and icse-writing-style for the paper shape.