The State of Open Science in Software Engineering Research: A Case Study of ICSE Artifacts
Although top-tier conferences such as ICSE now commonly require authors to submit replication packages, the actual executability and reproducibility of these packages remain largely unassessed. This study presents a large-scale empirical investigation of 100 replication packages from ICSE papers published between 2015 and 2024, involving approximately 650 person-hours of manual execution, debugging, and root-cause analysis. The findings reveal that only 40% of the packages are executable, with just 32.5% running without modification; 82.5% require moderate to substantial changes. Among the executable packages, merely 35% successfully reproduce the original results. This work is the first to expose a significant gap between executability and reproducibility in software engineering replication packages and proposes three actionable guidelines to improve their reliability and utility.