Motivation

This template exists mainly for two reasons:

  1. There is a real problem of missing, incomplete or otherwise unsatisfactory research artifacts in Computer Science. In my personal experience, this seems to be caused mostly by inertia (or laziness), as proper preparation of an artifact for publication is (or should be) in some ways similar to the practice of software release, which of course demands some organizational effort. A template could ease some of that pain by providing a base to construct upon.
  2. Since the work of constructing an artifact should be a core part of research (and not just an afterthought), and in the interest of reproducibility, the artifact itself could (and should) be used for any experiments presented in the paper.1 This ensures that the very environment which produced the data shown in the paper is available to anyone, such as artifact evaluators, essentially guaranteeing a smooth reproduction of the experiments.
1

Of course, this should be done during the latest phase of experimentation, when there is a clear understanding of which experimental results are needed for the paper. It is not worthwhile to develop a stable, publishable artifact during the prototyping phase, when experimental results are not yet clear and the fate of the paper is still largely undecided.