2.2 Which of these are most common? The most common kind of ICSE paper reports an improved method or means of developing software—that is, of designing, implementing, evolving, maintaining, or otherwise operating on the software system itself. Papers addressing these questions dominate both the submitted and the accepted papers. Also fairly common are papers about methods for reasoning about software systems, principally analysis of correctness (testing and verification). Analysis papers have a modest acceptance edge in this very selective conference.
Table 2 gives the distribution of submissions to ICSE 2002, based on reading the abstracts (not the full papers— but remember that the abstract tells a reader what to expect from the paper). For each type of research question,