SIGSOFT Annual Report

July 2001 - June 2002

Submitted by: Alexander Wolf, SIGSOFT Chair

SIGSOFT has had a strong, but challenging year. A new set of officers took their positions, with only the Chair (and, of course, the Past Chair) having served previously.

On the awards front, we continued to make our annual service and research awards. This year's ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award was presented to Prof. Lori Clarke of the University of Massachusetts. We awarded the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award to Dr. Gerard Holzmann of Lucent Technologies. The awards were announced at ICSE 2002 in Orlando, with the presentation to Prof. Clarke taking place at the conference. Dr. Holzmann will receive his award at SIGSOFT 2002 in November 2002, and will give a keynote address. We also continued to award the Most Influential Paper from ICSE N-10, which this year went to the ICSE-12 (1992) paper "Towards a Method of Programming with Assertions", authored by David Rosenblum. We made a number of awards to students for travel support to SIGSOFT-sponsored conferences, under our CAPS (Conference Attendance Program for Students) program. Finally, our initiative to have the program committees of SIGSOFT-sponsored conferences name up to 10% of their papers as Distinguished Papers was approved by the ACM awards committee.

Our major conferences continue to be strong, but we met with some serious challenges with some of them. ESEC/FSE 2001 was held in Vienna, Austria, with a leadership team of A. Min Tjoa (general chair) and Volker Gruhn (program chair). However, the conference began on the evening of September 11th, which had an obvious effect on the atmosphere, although not the finances, of the conference. ICSE 2002 was held in Orlando, Florida, with a leadership team of Will Tracz (general chair), and Jeff Magee and Michel Young (program co-chairs). The conference was originally scheduled to be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but the political crisis there in late 2001 caused the difficult decision to move the event to Orlando. Only with the incredible dedication and help of the ACM SIG Services staff were we able to make the move with a minimum of disruption and lost revenue. In fact, we expect the conference to result in a small surplus.

SIGOSFT 2002 will be in Charleston, South Carolina, with Mary Lou Soffa as general chair and William Griswold as program chair. FSE 2003 will be joint with the European Software Engineering Conference (ESEC) in Helsinki, Finland, in September 2003, as the second of our three negotiated conferences under a Joint Sponsorship Agreement. Paola Inverardi is the program chair, and Jukka Paakki is the general chair. ICSE 2003 will be in Portland, Oregon, with Lori Clarke as general chair, and Laurie Dillon and Walter Tichy as program co-chairs. ICSE 2004 will be in Edinburgh, Scotland, with Anthony Finkelstein as general chair, and David Rosenblum and Jacky Estublier as program co-chairs. ICSE 2005 is planned for St. Louis, Missouri, with Catalin Roman as General Chair.

We have begun two new co-sponsoring relationships. One with the IEEE Computer Society on the UML conference series and the other with ACM SIGMETRICS on the WOSP workshop series. The first UML co-sponsored event is planned for Dresden, Germany, in September 2002. The second WOSP co-sponsored event is planned for Rome, Italy, in July 2002.

Will Tracz has continued to make our newsletter, SEN, stronger and stronger. With new columns, new blood, and lots of energy, SEN is a great member benefit for SIGSOFT. However, SEN is expensive to produce, and so provides a great opportunity to significantly reduce our costs. We have begun an initiative to look at moving much of the SEN content on line.

An important initiative that SIGSOFT has engaged in is the Impact Project, whose goals are to conduct a scholarly assessment of the impact of software engineering research on software engineering practice, and to provide a roadmap for future research funding. SIGSOFT obtained a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to partially fund the activities of the group. The principal investigator of the grant is the SIGSOFT Chair, Alexander Wolf. This is a truly international collaboration, with participation from researchers and practitioners from across the world. In addition, the British IEE has provided a grant to support European participation. The Impact project can provide a blueprint for how other ACM SIGs can conduct similar assessments.