SIGSOFT seeks to improve our ability to engineer software by stimulating interaction among practitioners, researchers, and educators; by fostering the professional development of software engineers; and by representing software engineers to professional, legal, and political entities.
ACM's SIGSOFT had another excellent year, both technically and financially in 2016-2017. This report provides a summary of key SIGSOFT activities over the past year.
AWARDS GIVEN OUT
SIGSOFT's awards program recognizes the many achievements of the software engineering community (see http://www.sigsoft.org/ for the most recent awardees). A number of the awards, including our prestigious service, research, and education awards, were presented again this year at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2017) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
SIGNIFICANT PAPERS ON NEW AREAS
Software engineering has traditionally been an interdisciplinary area, branching into a range of different application domains as well as other research areas in computer science, such as human-computer interaction, mobile computing, artificial intelligence, distributed systems, more recently big data and machine learning, and so on. This is because every facet of computing, as well as many other scientific and engineering disciplines, depend on software. Advances in these other areas mentioned above - from big data, to the cloud, virtualization, deep learning, mobile computing, formal methods, computer security, etc., with applications in autonomous vehicles, robotics, medicine, and countless other areas - require corresponding software engineering methods, tools, and techniques. This is reflected in the types of papers that increasingly appear in software engineering venues sponsored by SIGSOFT. Such papers tend to combine advances in multiple areas into solutions to specific problems. As examples, we highlight two such papers, the first a recipient of the SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, held in November 2016 in Seattle, USA (FSE 2016), and the second a recipient of the same award at the International Conference on Software Engineering, held in May 2017 in Buenos Aires, Argentina (ICSE 2017):
We have decided to highlight these two papers as a way of demonstrating the breadth of topics that are commonly covered in SIGSOFT-sponsored conferences today.
INNOVATIVE PROGRAMS
Over the past several years, SIGSOFT has introduced a number of programs to aid and expand our membership. Some representative examples are as follows. Our student-members receive discounted membership rates and significantly discounted registration fees at all SIGSOFT-sponsored conferences. Most of our conferences offer Doctoral Symposia where students are mentored by experienced Software Engineering professors. The SIGSOFT Webinar series has become quite popular; in the past year, which had a lighter slate than usual that included only 4 webinars we still had a total of 1,486 attendees both live and on-demand. We recently introduced the Early Career Award that recognizes individuals at early stages in their careers; the past year was the inaugural year of the Early Career Award. SIGSOFT provides travel support to conferences for dozens of graduate and undergraduate student-members as well as support to defray the costs of childcare for all members of our community (faculty qualify as well), through the Conference Aid Program for Students (CAPS); as of this year, CAPS will be extended to help defray travel costs of a certain number of post-doctoral researchers.
To broaden SIGSOFT's reach and membership, SIGSOFT has established national chapters in India (ISoft) and China (CSoft). Each chapter has a liaison on the SIGSOFT EC, in addition to our long-standing International Liaison. As part of the support for these two communities specifically, SIGSOFT sponsors travel for a total of four SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award winning authors to present their work at ISoft's and CSoft's flagship national events (two at each event). The success of this program is reflected in this year's decision by the organizers of ISEC 2017, ISoft's premier event, to fund the attendance and presentation of two additional SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award winners. Furthermore, SIGSOFT has sponsored travel for two speakers at each of the three annual Warm-up Workshops organized to expose the Latin American software engineering community to ICSE, which was held in Buenos Aires in 2017. SIGSOFT is currently in discussions with the organizers of ICSE 2017 to sponsor a post-mortem event for the Latin American software engineering community.
KEY ISSUES FACING SIGSOFT
While SIGSOFT is stable and strong, there are several challenges we continue to face: