This award is presented at each ICSE meeting to the author(s) of the paper from the ICSE meeting 10 years prior that is judged to have had the most influence on the theory or practice of software engineering during the 10 years since its original publication.
The award is jointly sponsored by ACM SIGSOFT and IEEE TCSE.
Recipients are given a plaque engraved with their names and signed by the General Chair of ICSE'N. The award is presented yearly by the ICSE'N general chair at ICSE during ICSE's award presentation session. The recipients are asked to give a presentation to the conference on their current views on software engineering. When more than one paper receives strong support, honorable mention awards are sometimes given as deemed appropriate.
| 2023 | Hoang Duong Thien Nguyen, Dawei Qi, Abhik Roychoudhury, Satish Chandra: SemFix: Program Repair via Semantic Analysis, ICSE-35, 2013 |
| 2022 | Abram Hindle, Earl T. Barr, Zhendong Su, Mark Gabel, Premkumar Devanbu: On the Naturalness of Software, ICSE-34, 2012 |
| 2021 | Andrea Arcuri, Lionel Briand: A Practical Guide for Using Statistical Tests to Assess Randomized Algorithms in Software Engineering, ICSE-33, 2011 |
| 2020 | Susmit Jha, Sumit Gulwani, Sanjit A. Seshia, Ashish Tiwari: Oracle-Guided Component-Based Program Synthesis, ICSE-32, 2010 |
| 2019 | Westley Weimer, ThanhVu Nguyen, Claire Le Goues, Stephanie Forrest: Automatically finding patches using genetic programming, ICSE-31, 2009 |
| 2018 | Amy J. Ko, Brad A. Myers: Debugging reinvented: Asking and answering why and why not questions about program behavior, ICSE-30, 2008 |
| 2017 | Carlos Pacheco, Shuvendu K. Lahiri, Michael D. Ernst, and Thomas Ball: Feedback-Directed Random Test Generation, ICSE-29, 2007 |
| 2016 | John Anvik, Lyndon Hiew, and Gail C. Murphy: Who Should Fix This Bug?, ICSE-28, 2006 |
| 2015 | James H. Andrews, Lionel C. Briand, and Yvan Labiche: Is Mutation an Appropriate Tool for Testing Experiments?, ICSE-27, 2005 |
| 2014 | Thomas Zimmerman, Peter Weisgerber, Stephan Diehl and Andreas Zeller: Mining Version Histories to Guide Software Changes, ICSE-26, 2004 |
| 2013 | Davor Čubranić and Gail C. Murphy: Hipikat: Recommending Pertinent Software Development Artifacts, ICSE-25, 2003 |
| 2012 | Jonathan Aldrich, Craig Chambers, David Notkin: ArchJava: Connecting Software Architecture to Implementation, ICSE-24, 2002 |
| 2011 | Filippo Ricca and Paolo Tonella: Analysis and testing of Web applications, ICSE-23, 2001 |
| 2010 | Audris Mockus, Roy T. Fielding, James Herbsleb: A case study of open source software development: the Apache server, ICSE-22, 2000 and James C. Corbett, Matthew B. Dwyer, John Hatcliff, Shawn Laubach, Corina S. Pasareanu, Robby, Hongjun Zheng: Bandera: extracting finite-state models from Java source code, ICSE-22, 2000 |
| 2009 | Peri Tarr, Harold Ossher, William Harrison, and Stanley M. Sutton: N Degrees of Separation: Multi-Dimensional Separation of Concerns, ICSE-21, 1999 |
| 2008 | Peyman Oreizy, Nenad Medvidovic and Richard N. Taylor: Architecture-Based Runtime Software Evolution, ICSE-20, 1998 |
| 2007 | Antonio Carzaniga, Gian Pietro Picco and Giovanni Vigna: Designing Distributed Applications with Mobile Code Paradigms, ICSE-19, 1997 |
| 2006 | No Award |
| 2005 | Michael Jackson, Pamela Zave: Deriving Specifications from Requirements: An Example, ICSE-17, 1995 |
| 2004 | Robert Allen, David Garlan: Formalizing Architectural Connection, ICSE-16, 1994 |
| 2003 | Bashar Nuseibeh, Jeff Kramer, Anthony Finkelstein: Expressing the Relationships between Multiple Views in Requirements Specification, ICSE-15, 1993 |
| 2002 | David S. Rosenblum: Towards a Method of Programming with Assertions, ICSE-14, 1992 |
| 2001 | Robert Balzer: Tolerating Inconsistency, ICSE-13, 1991 |
| 2000 | No award |
| 1999 | Dewayne Perry: The Inscape Environment, ICSE-11, 1989 |
| 1998 | David Harel, Hagi Lachover, Amnon Naamad, Amir Pnueli, Michal Politi, Rivi Sherman, Aharon Shtul-Trauring: Statemate: A Working Environment for the Development of Complex Reactive Systems, ICSE-10, 1988 |
| 1997 | Manny Lehman: Process Models, Process Programs, Programming Support, ICSE-9, 1987 and Lee Osterweil: Software Processes are Software Too, ICSE-9, 1987 |
| 1996 | Sam Redwine Jr., William Riddle: Software Technology Maturation, ICSE-8, 1985 |
| 1995 | David L. Parnas, Paul C. Clements, David M. Weiss: The Modular Structure of Complex Systems, ICSE-7, 1984 |
| 1994 | Sol Greenspan, John Mylopoulos, Alex Borgida: Capturing More World Knowledge in the Requirements Specification, ICSE-6, 1982 |
| 1993 | Mark Weiser: Program Slicing, ICSE-5, 1981 |
| 1992 | Walter Tichy: Software Development Control Based on Module Interconnection, ICSE-4, 1979 |
| 1991 | David Parnas: Designing Software for Ease of Extension and Contraction, ICSE-3, 1978 |
| 1990 | William A. Wulf, Ralph L. London, Mary Shaw: An Introduction to the Construction and Verification of Alphard Programs, ICSE-2, 1976 |
| 1989 | Marc J. Rochkind: The Source Code Control System, NCSE-1, 1975 |