SIGSOFT FY'04 Annual Report

July 2003 - June 2004
Submitted by: Alexander Wolf, SIGSOFT Chair

SIGSOFT has had a strong year, the third for the current administration. Conference attendance rates appear to be picking up a bit and we are beginning to see the financial benefits of moving the bulk of our newsletter, Software Engineering Notes, on line.

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 Dr. Will Tracz of Lockheed Martin Corporation. We awarded the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award to Prof. Nancy Leveson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The awards were announced at ICSE 2004 in Edinburgh, with the presentation to Dr. Tracz taking place at the conference. Prof. Leveson will receive her award at SIGSOFT 2004 in November, 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 '94 paper "Formalizing Architectural Connection", authored by Robert Allen and David Garlan.

Finally, the program committees of SIGSOFT-sponsored conferences named up to 10% of their papers as Distinguished Papers.

Our major meetings continue to be strong. We now sponsor or co-sponsor approximately 12 major events, and are in cooperation with approximately 15 other major events. ICSE 2004, co-sponsored with the British IEE and the IEEE Computer Society, was a technical success and well attended. Unfortunately, budgeting was done in US dollars, which lost significant value against the British pound. The result is likely to be a financial loss due wholly to the problem of the exchange rate. ICSE 2005 will be held in St. Louis and ICSE 2006 in Shanghai. Planning has begun for ICSE 2007 and ICSE 2008. The ICSE steering committee, which is responsible for managing the conference series, was chaired by SIGSOFT at-large executive committee member Jeff Magee and is now chaired by SIGSOFT at-large executive committee member David Rosenblum.

We continue to make an increasing number of travel awards to students to support their attendance at SIGSOFT-sponsored conferences, under our CAPS (Conference Attendance Program for Students) program. The CAPS program transitioned from management by volunteer Betty Cheng of Michigan State University to volunteer Barbara Lerner of Williams College. We are continuing to study ways of controlling growth in the program and have instituted somewhat stricter requirements. We have also gotten the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Software Engineering to contribute to the program in support of ICSE attendance.

SIGSOFT continues to lead 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. A new section of the SIGSOFT web site is dedicated to documenting and publicizing the project. Two draft reports have appeared in SEN, one has been submitted for publication in ACM TOSEM, and two more are in preparation for submission to ACM TOSEM.