brycewang-stanford TACAS Workflow
Use this as the project-management skill for a TACAS submission. Replace every date with the current ETAPS joint schedule and work backwards from the EasyChair paper deadline — remembering that for a tool or tool-demonstration paper a second, firm artifact deadline lands about two weeks later and its evaluation runs in parallel with the PC. TACAS runs a single annual review round on the shared ETAPS calendar (it does not use ESOP's two rounds), so missing the deadline costs roughly a year.
TACAS is a conference whose proceedings are an open-access LNCS volume: it has no standing editor-in-chief and no author-facing APC. Rotating leadership is the per-edition PC chairs and the ETAPS steering committee; the cost model is registration, and ETAPS funds the gold open access centrally. Chairs rotate yearly — re-check the current TACAS page rather than carrying a name forward.
The reported TACAS 2026 timeline (verify on the live page)
- Paper submission: 16 Oct 2025 (AoE).
- Mandatory artifact (regular tool + tool-demonstration): 30 Oct 2025.
- Rebuttal / author response: 8-10 Dec 2025.
- Notification: 22 Dec 2025.
- Voluntary artifact (accepted research + case-study): 8 Jan 2026.
- Conference: ETAPS 2026, Turin, 11-16 Apr 2026 (main conferences 13-16 Apr).
As of 2026-07-09 the TACAS 2026 edition has already taken place, so the live next target is TACAS 2027 (ETAPS 2027, Copenhagen, 10-15 Apr 2027).
Milestones
- Venue + category fit: confirm TACAS over CAV/VMCAI/FMCAD and pick the category
(
tacas-topic-selection) — this fixes the page limit, blind mode, and artifact obligation. - Evidence + tool lock: freeze the algorithm/tool, the benchmark set, the baselines, and the artifact contents.
- Submission: upload the LNCS PDF via EasyChair; anonymize if it is a research paper.
- Mandatory artifact (tool/tool-demo): submit the clean-VM artifact on its firm deadline; it gates acceptance.
- Rebuttal: answer the reviews in the ETAPS response window.
- Notification: archive reviews and every submitted version.
- Voluntary artifact (research/case-study): if pursuing badges, submit after acceptance.
- Camera-ready + presentation: prepare the LNCS camera-ready, complete Springer rights, register, and present.
Backward plan from the paper deadline
| Weeks out (heuristic) | Verification-tool milestone |
|---|---|
| 10+ | Category chosen; algorithm/tool feature-frozen; benchmark set and baselines chosen |
| 8 | Experiments run; wall-clock/scalability logged on stated hardware; soundness argument drafted |
| 6 | Comparison against the strongest baseline complete with equal budgets; results tables built |
| 4 | Full draft in llncs.cls within the page limit; artifact assembled in the clean VM |
| 3 | Internal mock review by a verification-literate reader; artifact dry-run on a fresh VM |
| 2 | Tool/tool-demo: freeze the artifact for its post-paper deadline; research: anonymity sweep |
| 1 | Final PDF check; EasyChair fields, category, conflicts complete |
| 0 | Submit paper; then (tool/tool-demo) submit the mandatory artifact on its firm date |
These offsets are planning heuristics only — anchor every one to the current ETAPS joint CfP, never to a previous cycle.
Failure modes by stage
- Leaving the artifact to after the paper for a tool/tool-demo paper — the mandatory artifact deadline is only ~two weeks out and a package that does not build on the ETAPS VM costs the paper.
- Experiments still moving at week 4 forces last-minute benchmark runs nobody has audited — the classic unfair-comparison or unreproducible-result reject.
- Anonymizing the wrong category — stripping the tool name from a single-blind tool paper, or forgetting to anonymize a double-blind research paper.
- Treating the rebuttal as decisive — it corrects misreadings and supplies a missing number; it does not rewrite the paper.
Coordination notes
- Assign one owner for the artifact / clean-VM build and another for the paper; for a tool paper these are two deadlines a fortnight apart and shared ownership is how the artifact slips.
- Archive the exact submitted PDF and artifact — the rebuttal and camera-ready must quote them.
Output format
[Current stage] idea / evidence / writing / submitted / rebuttal / notified / camera-ready / accepted
[Category] research / case-study / regular tool / tool-demonstration
[Next official deadline] <paper or mandatory-artifact date and source, or unknown>
[Critical path] <three tasks that determine readiness, incl. artifact for tool papers>
[Risk register] <category fit / page limit / anonymity / benchmark fairness / artifact-on-VM / presentation>
[Owner map] <task -> person or role>