ICSME Submission

Run this audit before uploading to the ICSME EasyChair site. ICSME research papers are IEEE conference papers that publish in IEEE Xplore, judged in a single double-anonymous round. Every number below was read from the ICSME 2026 research-papers call on 2026-07-09 via search renderings of the conf.researchr.org and EasyChair URLs (see resources/official-source-map.md); treat them as a one-cycle snapshot and reopen the live call first.

The abstract-then-paper two-step

ICSME separates abstract registration from full-paper upload, and both are AoE:

• Abstract locks in title, abstract, authors, and topic areas about a week early (ICSME 2026: 27 February 2026). New submissions are not accepted after this; only updates to registered ones.
• Full paper uploads the anonymized PDF (ICSME 2026: 6 March 2026).

Register with the real title and abstract, not a placeholder — the abstract drives reviewer bidding on EasyChair, and a registered abstract that diverges from the final paper worsens your PC match and can strand the submission if you miss the abstract cutoff.

Format and page budget

• IEEE two-column conference proceedings format, \documentclass[conference]{IEEEtran} for LaTeX; Word users take the US-Letter IEEE template. This is the IEEE path — do not carry an ACM acmart single-column habit over from ICSE-adjacent ACM venues or from FSE.
• Page budget (verify per cycle): ICSME 2026 posts 10 pages including all text, figures, tables, and appendices, plus up to 2 pages containing references only. There is no separate unlimited appendix — anything reviewers must read to judge the paper lives inside the 10 pages.
• Margins, font size, and column layout are fixed by IEEEtran; editorial compression, not template tampering, is how you recover space. A shrunk font or widened text block is a named desk-reject.

Double-anonymous sweep

ICSME runs double-anonymous review: author identity must be hidden from reviewers. Because maintenance/evolution papers lean on named subject systems, mined repositories, and tools, the leak surface is wide:

# Mechanical pass on the submission PDF and any anonymized artifact archive
pdfinfo paper.pdf | grep -Ei 'author|creator|producer'
pdftotext paper.pdf - | grep -nEi 'github\.com/[a-z0-9-]+|gitlab|zenodo\.org/record|acknowledg|grant' | head
unzip -l artifact.zip | grep -Ei '\.git/|\.DS_Store|/home/|/Users/' | head
grep -rni 'university\|@[a-z0-9.]*\.edu\|our (tool|group|lab)' artifact/ --include='*.md' | head

The ICSME-specific leaks: a study that names your own system as the subject, a mined corpus that is obviously your public GitHub org, a tool named after your lab, commit metadata inside a zipped repository, and a data-availability link pointing at a personal account. Refer to your own prior maintenance studies in the third person, and re-host artifacts behind an anonymizing service before upload.

Open science at submission time

ICSME's ROSE-Festival culture makes open science the default expectation, even at review time:

• Provide an anonymized artifact link (or upload anonymized material) and a data-availability statement describing the mined corpus, subject systems, scripts, and where they will live after acceptance.
• Pin mining provenance now — repository SHAs, extraction dates, inclusion/exclusion criteria — and cache any LLM outputs; these cannot be reconstructed at review time.
• If confidentiality (an industrial legacy system, proprietary change history) blocks sharing, say so and why; a silent gap reads as a scored weakness, not a neutral choice.

Desk-risk triage

Finding at audit time	Severity	Real fix
Main text over 10 pages (figures/appendices counted)	Desk-reject-grade	Cut or move to the artifact; the 2 reference pages do not absorb body text
Template altered (margins, shrunk font, wrong class)	Named desk-reject ground	Recompile clean IEEEtran conference, recover space editorially
Identity leak in PDF, artifact, subject-system choice, or tool name	Anonymity violation	Re-anonymize and re-host; scrub PDF metadata
Abstract not registered by the earlier date	No submission slot exists	Nothing fixes this post-AoE — calendar it now
No availability statement, no artifact	Scored against the paper under ROSE norms	Add the statement + an anonymized package
Same study under review elsewhere	Dual-submission exposure	Withdraw one venue; verify the current concurrent-submission wording

Final-week order of operations

1. Freeze the body early; references can churn, the argument cannot.
2. Register title/abstract/authors/topics on EasyChair well before the abstract cutoff.
3. Build the anonymized artifact and place its link and data-availability statement in the paper.
4. Run the mechanical anonymity checks on the final PDF and the final archive, not drafts.
5. Fill every EasyChair field — topics that match your evidence, conflicts for every coauthor's institution and recent collaborators — a day early; late conflicts are the classic failure.
6. Re-download the uploaded PDF and read it cold to confirm it is the file you meant.

Reverify each cycle

• Whether the abstract-then-paper two-step and its exact dates hold.
• The page budget (10+2 in 2026) and which IEEEtran revision is required.
• Supplementary handling, the ROSE-Festival timing, dual-submission wording, and any AI-disclosure rule — all cycle-volatile; none should be assumed stable.

Output format

[ICSME submission status] ready / blocked / needs work
[Abstract step] title/abstract/authors/topics registered by the earlier deadline? yes/no
[Format] pages used (body/refs), IEEEtran conference compliance
[Anonymity] clean / leaks: <where, incl. subject-system and tool-name leaks>
[Open science] anonymized artifact link present? data-availability statement present?
[Fix queue] <ordered, with owners and dates before the AoE cutoff>