TACAS Skills

Use when planning a TACAS (ETAPS) project timeline from category choice and venue fit through the EasyChair paper deadline, the mandatory tool-paper artifact deadline, the rebuttal window, notification, the voluntary post-acceptance artifact round, LNCS camera-ready, and presentation, with backward-planning offsets that account for TACAS's single annual round and its parallel paper+artifact review.

Use when auditing a TACAS (ETAPS) submission for EasyChair readiness, covering the choice among the four paper categories (research, case-study, regular tool, tool-demonstration), the correct LNCS page limit and llncs.cls format, the per-category blind mode (double-blind research vs single-blind tool/case-study), the mandatory tool-paper artifact deadline, and desk-reject triage before the firm ETAPS deadline.

Use when designing or auditing a TACAS (ETAPS) evaluation, covering shared verification benchmarks (SV-COMP-style task sets), fair baseline configuration and equal time budgets, honest wall-clock/scalability reporting on stated hardware, soundness checking of results, reproducibility on the clean artifact VM, and how a TACAS tool-paper evaluation differs from a SV-COMP competition entry.

Use when preparing an accepted TACAS (ETAPS) paper for its Springer LNCS camera-ready, covering de-anonymization of a double-blind research paper, the llncs.cls format and LNCS metadata (ORCID, references, the Springer copyright/consent-to-publish form), the gold-open-access CC-BY licensing, integrating reviewer-required changes without scope creep, permanentizing artifact links, and adding earned ETAPS artifact badges to the title page.

Use when positioning a TACAS (ETAPS) submission against the verification literature across TACAS, CAV, VMCAI, FMCAD, SPIN, and journals (STTT, FMSD), writing delta-first contrast against the nearest tools and algorithms, crediting the benchmarks and solvers you build on, keeping self-citations anonymous for double-blind research papers, and handling competition-tool and prior-version overlap.

Use when deciding what belongs in a TACAS (ETAPS) paper body versus its appendix, supplementary website, and artifact, covering the 16-page (or 6-page) llncs.cls budget that excludes references and appendix, the rule that decision-critical content stays in the reviewed pages, category-appropriate anonymity of supplementary material, and how to split a verification paper between body, appendix, and a mandatory-or-voluntary artifact.

Use when revising a TACAS (ETAPS) paper for a clear construction-or-analysis contribution on the first page, a stated soundness/completeness claim, honest benchmark evidence, category-appropriate structure (research vs tool vs case-study vs tool-demo), disciplined use of the 16-page (or 6-page) LNCS budget, and correct handling of double-blind wording for research papers.

Use when reasoning about how a TACAS (ETAPS) submission is evaluated, covering the per-category blind model (double-blind research vs single-blind tool/case-study), the single annual PC round with a rebuttal, the parallel mandatory artifact evaluation that feeds tool-paper acceptance, accept/reject decisions, and how TACAS's process differs from CAV's and from a journal's.

Use when drafting a TACAS (ETAPS) author response for the rebuttal window, covering the short single-round rebuttal, answering soundness and benchmark-fairness objections with checkable evidence, addressing artifact concerns for tool papers, respecting the per-category blind model when it applies, and reading which objections a rebuttal can and cannot move.

Use when strengthening TACAS (ETAPS) reproducibility, covering the clean evaluation-VM packaging that the artifact process assumes, pinned dependencies and offline execution, a claim-to-script mapping so every benchmark number regenerates, honest degrees of reproducibility, consistency between the paper and the artifact, and the category difference between a mandatory tool-paper artifact and a voluntary research-paper artifact.

Use when deciding whether a formal-methods / verification project belongs at TACAS (ETAPS) or a sibling like CAV, VMCAI, FMCAD, SPIN, or a journal, AND — distinctively — which of TACAS's four categories (research, case-study, regular tool, tool-demonstration) it fits, plus whether the work is a SV-COMP competition contribution rather than a paper.

Use when packaging a TACAS (ETAPS) artifact for the ETAPS Artifact Badges (Available, Functional, Reusable), covering the two-round model (mandatory, PC-parallel evaluation for tool and tool-demo papers vs voluntary post-acceptance evaluation for research and case-study papers), what the AEC checks on the clean evaluation VM, DOI-issuing archives, and evaluator-proof documentation.