SIGSOFT Annual Report

July 2000 - June 2001

Submitted by: David Notkin, Chair

SIGSOFT has had another strong year, and we are well-positioned to hand off the leadership to our newly elected slate of officers.

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 Kouichi Kishida, who has served the software engineering community in many ways (including opening up many of the relationships between Japan and the remainder of the software engineering community). This year we awarded the Outstanding Research Awards to Michael Jackson. The awards were announced at ICSE 2001 in Toronto, with the presentation to Mr. Kishida taking place; Mr. Jackson will receive his award at ESEC/FSE in September 2001 as part of his keynote address. We also continued to award the Most Influential Paper from ICSE N-10, which this year went to the ICSE-11 paper "Tolerating Inconsistency", authored by Bob Balzer. We made a number of awards to students for travel support to SIGSOFT-sponsored conferences, under our CAPS program; indeed, for ICSE 2001 in Toronto we increased our awards to handle much more of the demand. As is common, several of the new ACM Fellows are members of SIGSOFT.

We have one specific issue with respect to awards that needs to be handled. Several years ago the SIGSOFT Executive Committee agreed to have Program Committees name up to 10% of the papers from conferences as Distinguished Papers; we have, however, never put this decision into action. We plan to do so this year, also understanding that we need to clear this through the ACM awards committee. We have made significant progress on making the award nomination process more visible and active: indeed, the research award was awarded in part due to a well-prepared and effective nomination that was received.

We have been involved this year in a number of significant and innovative programs.

  • Our major conferences continue to be strong. FSE 2000 was held in San Diego, with a leadership team of John Knight (general chair) and David Rosenblum (program chair). ICSE 2001 was held in Toronto --- our first time in Canada --- with a leadership team of Hausi Mueller (general chair) and Mary Jean Harrold and Wilhelm Schaefer (program co-chairs). ISSTA 2000 was held in Portland, Oregon, with Debra Richardson as general chair and Mary Jean Harrold as program chair. All three conferences were highly successful both programmatically and financially.
  • FSE 2001 will be joint with the European Software Engineering Conference (ESEC) in Vienna in September 2001, as the first of our three negotiated conferences under our Joint Sponsorship Agreement. Volker Gruhn is the program chair, and A. Min Tjoa is the general chair. FSE 2002 will be in Charleston, S.C., with Mary Lou Soffa as general chair and Bill Griswold as program chair.
  • ICSE 2002 will be in Buenos Aires Argentina, with Will Tracz as general chair and Michal Young and Jeff Magee as program co-chairs. ICSE 2003 will be in Portland, 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.
  • We held our third joint PASTE (Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering) workshop jointly with SIGPLAN, with the workshop collocated with PLDI '01 in Snowbird. We have also identified a set of SIGSOFT and SIGPLAN conferences that have been set up for ongoing in-cooperation-with status.
  • 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.
  • We worked closely with the publications board and staff, ensuring an orderly transition of the editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology from Axel van Lamsweerde's to Carlo Ghezzi.

One major goal in the next year is to simultaneously increase interactions with other SIGs while also trying to regularize our conferences and conference schedule. Another major goal, which we share with other SIGs and the ACM overall, is to continue to try to understand what value we should provide to our members to ensure that SIGSOFT is an organization that people want to be members of.