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Photograph: City in the Twilight by Paul Malcolm

Call for Papers: Artifacts Track

Goal and Scope

The ICSME 2016 artifacts track exists to promote, celebrate, and catalog excellent examples of research artifacts in software engineering. These artifacts are reusable units of research that can be used to support other research endeavors.

This track asks researchers to "take some scissors" to their work, dividing it into separate "chunks." These chunks, which we will call "artifacts," are the support materials that enabled the creation of the results published in a paper.

For examples of research artifacts, please review the ICSME 2016 Artifacts Tutorial. Please also review the (non-exhaustive) list of known research artifact types. If your proposed artifact is not on that list, please email the chairs (tim.menzies@gmail.com and olga.baysal@carleton.ca) before submitting. Note: We are open to extending the list of acceptable research artifacts!

Submissions must contain:

  • Name of artifact
  • Author(s)' contact details
  • How the artifact is licensed
  • For longer artifacts: a URL where the submission can be downloaded
  • For shorter artifacts (less than 10 pages in conference format): attached to the commentary.
  • The scorecard sub-headings (see below), making the case that the artifact is worthy of inclusion in the track
  • References (included in the two page limit)
  • Optionally, consider applying the standard "Design Patterns" template by Coplein to explain the artifact: context, forces, solution, resulting context, and rationale. You may wish to review some examples of this format.
Important Note

For artifacts that are executable tools, please submit to the ICSME 2016 tool demonstrations track. For all other types of artifacts, please submit to this track.

Evaluation

All submissions that meet the submission criteria (see below) and fit the scope of the conference will be reviewed by three members of the artifacts track program committee. Submissions will be evaluated as accepted or rejected.

Artifacts will be scored using the following scorecard:

Insightful
  • Timely (i.e., addresses a problem that is most current and most pressing)?
  • Makes researchers "smarter" in some way (e.g., identifies and fills some significant gap in prior work)?
Useful
  • Serves a useful purpose?
  • Serves a purpose that would otherwise be tedious, prolonged, awkward, or impossible?
  • Cost-effective?
Usable
  • Easy to understand?
  • Accompanied by tutorial notes?
  • Artifacts need not be executable but if so, are they:
    • Easy to download, install, or execute?
    • Available in a virtual machine image?
    • Available online?
    • Supported by configuration management tools to permit easy updates?

Note that the shorter the artifact:

  • The greater must be its insight.
    For an example of a short artifact that might have been rated "Gold," we reference half a page from a recent TSE paper. In that paper, Section 2.1 and Figure 1 could be considered a motivational "artifact" that calls for more work on customizing analytic techniques for particular sites.
  • The greater the onus on the author for demonstrating that the artifact is worthy.
    For example, for anti-patterns there needs to be some supporting text or results arguing that the anti-pattern is (a) actually seen in practice and (b) a significant problem.

Submissions that are not in compliance with the required submission format or that are out of the scope of the conference will be rejected without being reviewed. Submitted papers must comply with IEEE plagiarism policy and procedures. Papers submitted to the artifacts track must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere while under consideration for ICSME 2016.

Important Note

For longer artifacts which the authors provide via a URL, the chairs will download the material within one week of the submission date. Materials that are not online during that period will not be reviewed.

Publication and Presentation

Accepted papers will be published in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. Please review the ICSME 2016 Publication Requirements for more details. Each paper will be presented as a poster. Presentation details will follow notifications of acceptance.

How to Submit, and the Review Process

Submissions must be formatted according to the ICSME 2016 Formatting Instructions. This submission would include two (1+1) pages:

  1. First page: Describe the artifact along the dimensions of the scorecard (i.e., Insightful, Useful, Usable). Refer to the Evaluation criteria above. This scorecard will be used to evaluate your artifact.
  2. Second page: Describe the artifact and how one can use it (mention about any difficulties one might encounter in using the artifact, or its maturity relative to the content of the paper). This page will be used in the proceedings once the artifact is accepted. The description of the artifact for the proceedings must not exceed 1 page (including all text, references, and figures).

Get a GitHub account and email that name to icsme2016-artifacts@easychair.org with the subject line: "ICSME16 artifacts track, add my account to the repository."

Our reply to you will point to a GitHub repository and a directory for submissions. Drag and drop your PDF onto that directory.

Create an issue in that repository whose title is the XXX_YYY. Do not add any text to the comment.

Review of the artifacts will be conducted in GitHub where reviewers’ feedback will be public.

Important Dates

Paper submission
July 1, 2016
Author notification
August 4, 2016

Submissions close at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12)