ICSME Related Work

Use this to audit novelty and eligibility. ICSME reviewers are close to the maintenance/evolution literature and expect to see where your paper sits relative to the nearest prior work — stated as a delta, not a list. Because the venue values replication (the RENE track) and rewards honest re-examination, "we redo prior work" is a legitimate contribution when framed as one — but it must engage the original explicitly. Reopen the current call for dual-submission, anonymity, and prior-publication rules before advising.

Positioning checks

• Separate the maintenance/evolution novelty from the engineering effort. What is new: a technique, an empirical finding about how software ages, a validated measurement of debt or comprehension, a recovered model, or an evidence regime nobody had covered?
• Cover the maintenance lanes. ICSME reviewers expect the evolution venues and journals, not just the papers nearest your method (see the table). A bibliography missing the obvious sibling work reads as unaware of the community.
• Write delta-first. Each closely related paper gets one sentence naming what it did and one naming what you do differently — not a summary. Position, don't catalog.
• Preserve double-anonymity. Cite your own prior maintenance studies in the third person and never link reviewers to an identity-revealing preprint, repository, or homepage.
• Declare overlap with any prior workshop/short version or a replicated original; for a RENE submission, name the exact study you reproduce.

Maintenance literature lanes

A bibliography that cites only your own subarea tells a reviewer the delta may be smaller than claimed; one that reaches the evolution siblings and journals signals command of the field.

Delta-first positioning vignette

Suppose the paper proposes a predictor of technical-debt hotspots plus a study. Its nearest neighbors: a foundational empirical study characterizing debt accumulation (no predictor), an MSR tool that mines debt-related commits (detection, not prediction), and a TSE study on debt repayment economics (scope, no method). The novelty sentence should name all three contrasts — prediction where the study offered characterization, forward-looking where the tool was retrospective, and a technique where the journal offered only economics.

Replication and prior-version judgment calls

[RENE replication]        name the exact original study; state what you kept identical and what you
                          extended (new datasets, new systems); frame reproducibility as the contribution
[Concurrent arXiv work]   cite neutrally, state the technical difference, avoid priority claims;
                          keep the citation double-anonymous
[Your workshop/SANER version] usually citable, but confirm against the current CFP and phrase so
                          anonymity survives; state what the full paper adds
[Prior short/NIER version] declare the overlap and state what the full study adds beyond it
[Archival status unclear] declare the overlap in the submission form rather than guessing

Eligibility red flags

• Substantial text overlap with a published paper by the same authors (self-plagiarism risk).
• A "new" study that re-reports a prior corpus's numbers without a new maintenance question — unless submitted to RENE and framed honestly as replication.
• Citations exclusively to non-maintenance venues, signaling a paper rerouted here without reframing.

Output format

[Eligibility] clear / needs declaration / risky
[Lanes covered] <maintenance-core / mining / comprehension-analysis / flagships / journals>
[Nearest 3 works] <work -> one-line delta>
[Replication framing] <n/a | RENE: original study named + what was extended>
[Novelty sentence] <ICSME-ready contribution contrast against the nearest prior work>