Panel: perspectives on software engineering

We welcome you to the Twenty-Eighth International Conference on Software Engineering and Shanghai, China. This is the first instance of the ICSE conference series to be held in China, and it is an exciting time and place for ICSE 2006. The conference brings researchers, educators, practitioners and students together to present, exchange ideas and engage in discussions about the recent and exciting innovations and research in software engineering. Exciting sessions on practical experience, educational issues, and doctoral and new faculty symposia have been organized. The conference also includes a wide variety of tutorial, workshops and demonstration offerings. Finally, since research and markets in our host country China are continuously growing, ICSE includes a separate Far East Track for discussions on the contributions and challenges of our Chinese colleagues. We trust that this mix will provide interesting and stimulating offerings to all members of our growing community. The technical program committee is pleased to present this conference proceeding that contains the research papers of the technical program for ICSE 2006. The technical program for this conference focuses on new and innovative software engineering contributions in theory, formal methods, system building and empirical studies. The papers represent an alluring array of topics, including software design, architecture, reuse, testing, analysis, processes and formal methods. Because of the growing number of paper submission and the resulting large program committees in the past, we instituted a new two-phase reviewing process this year. Our program committee had 36 members. In the first phase, each submitted paper was reviewed by 3 reviewers: 2 from the program committee and an external reviewer from the software engineering community. We had 265 external reviewers who contributed 370 reviews for this phase. Those papers receiving the best reviews were considered in the second phase. A total of 99 papers entered the second phase. Each of these papers was reviewed by another program committee member. Thus, each accepted paper had a total of 4 reviews (3 reviews from pc members and 1 review from an external reviewer). Each rejected paper had at least 3 reviews. The pc members reviewed 24-25 papers in the two phases, a reasonable number. We feel that this system worked very well. The program committee met for two days in December, 2005 in Frankfurt, Germany. By the end of the meeting, a consensus emerged for the 36 papers in this proceedings (9% of the total submissions). There were many high quality submissions that could not be accommodated in the program; hopefully a revised version will be published elsewhere. In addition to the papers, we organized four invited sessions. One invited session focuses on empirical studies, an increasingly important component of software engineering research and practice. We also have an invited panel that addresses the value and practice of formal methods. Since software engineering techniques are growing in importance in challenging safety critical domains, we included two invited sessions: one on software engineering for automotive engineering and the other on software engineering for assisted living. We are very pleased that a notably diverse and outstanding group of three leaders of the software engineering community have agreed to present keynote speeches. The opening day keynote will be presented by Prof. Yang Fuqing, from Peking University, a woman who has been at the very forefront of the software engineering communities of research and practice in China for decades. Her perspectives on the past and future of software engineering in China will be complemented by a keynote on similar themes presented on the second day. This second keynote will be delivered by Prof. Barry Boehm, from the University of Southern California, USA. His talk will review the history of software engineering research and practice in the West over the past decades, and project it forward into the 21st century. Finally, the keynote speaker on the third day, Mr. Reinhold Achatz, from Siemens Corp., will present a complementary view of software engineering research and practice, as viewed from the perspective of one of the great multinational corporations, based in Europe. We are truly excited at the prospect that these three keynotes will provide a searching multidimensional view of our community at this time of historic convergence of communities. The continued success and high quality of the ICSE conference series would not be possible without the help and support of the software engineering community. First, we would like to gratefully acknowledge and thank all of the authors who submitted papers. We especially thank the program committee members for their efforts and commitments in reviewing the papers and securing reviews from external reviewers. They put in an extraordinary amount of their time to provide thoughtful and knowledgeable reviews. The exceptionally strong technical program represented by the papers in this proceeding could not be possible without their efforts.

Analytical quality assurance, especially testing, is an integral part of software-intensive system development. With the increased usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) as part of such systems, this becomes more difficult as well-understood software testing approaches cannot be applied directly to the AI-enabled parts of the system. The required adaptation of classical testing approaches and the development of new concepts for AI would benefit from a deeper understanding and exchange between AI and software engineering experts. We see the different terminologies used in the two communities as a major obstacle on this way. As we consider a mutual understanding of the testing terminology a key, this paper contributes a mapping between the most important concepts from classical software testing and AI testing. In the mapping, we highlight differences in the relevance and naming of the mapped concepts.

A review of the qualitative research methods discussed in papers that study software engineering teams showed most of those papers did not follow a systematic process during the qualitative analysis. This finding is concerning as this deficiency in research analysis procedure may reduce the validity and/or completeness of the qualitative results. Such a lack of rigor may be a result of qualitative research not being as firmly established in software engineering as quantitative research methodologies. In engineering research, quantitative methods are typically more prevalent and qualitative analysis is part of a mixed-method analysis process. However, when researching teams, where human activity is abundant, qualitative analysis may need to take precedence. In this paper, we focus on the qualitative analysis method called content analysis with the goal of presenting a rigorous process for content analysis in the context of software engineering. We then present and demonstrate the use of that content analysis process for software engineering researchers using two examples. An analysis of 215 articles that were a result of a mapping study on software engineering team research is presented. Those papers were analyzed to determine which utilized a qualitative data analysis method in their research in addition to the rigor and type of qualitative analysis performed. We ultimately included 23 papers in this study. We present a mapping study and a content analysis process that include a straightforward way to select, code, and present data in both inductive and deductive studies. We demonstrated the process using the keywords from the papers included in this study as well as on a second data set that utilized responses from structured interview transcripts from practicing software engineers. The first dataset also resulted in a taxonomy to categorize software engineering team research. We presented and demonstrated a content analysis process in terms of software engineering in order to improve future qualitative software engineering research that would benefit from systematic content analysis.

Increasing demand for software engineers has caused academia to search for means to incorporate software engineering into the existing computer science curriculum. This paper explores traditional software engineering instructional methods and then provides a case study of a two semester practicum modeled after specialized training programs. These practicums, integrated into the University of Idaho Computer Science program, require all computer science seniors to solve "real-world" software engineering problems for actual customers. The practicums serve as quality control exit requirements to ensure that computer science graduates have the software engineering skills required in industry and graduate school. The integrated nature of the computer science program uniquely provides experiential variety while fostering individual responsibility, group interaction skills, and practical experience.

Search-based software engineering (SBSE) consists of the application of metaheuristic search techniques—such as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, hill climbing, and tabu search—to software engineering problems. This idea is based on the observation that some software engineering activities can be thought of as optimization problems, and on the fact that techniques providing exact solutions are, very often, unable to adequately scale to large, real-world software engineering problems. Define fitness functions to guide an automated search for solutions, rather than attempting to construct solutions from scratch by hand. SBSE moves the engineer up the abstraction chain, from the tedious and expensive role of detailed solution construction, to the potentially more productive and more cost-effective area of fitness function design. This approach has been repeatedly demonstrated to have successful applications across the software engineering life cycle from requirements and project planning to maintenance and testing. This special issue focuses on applications of search SBSE to the maintenance phase of the life cycle. After software testing 2, software maintenance is the most widely studied application area for SBSE research. Work on SBSE applications to problems in software maintenance can be traced back to the pioneering work of the Mancoridis et al. 3, which led to the development of the Bunch tool for software re-modularization 4. In the past five years there has been a significant increase in SBSE applications to software maintenance and evolution. Search-based techniques have been applied to post-development code improvement problems, such as object-oriented refactoring 5, 6, and imperative language slicing and transformation 7. Other applications are related to software engineering economics and project management problems, such as release planning 8-12, effort, and cost estimation 13-16, and project staffing and planning 17-20. Last, but not the least, SBSE has been applied to deal with service-oriented architectures, for example for services QoS-aware composition 21, service-level agreement negotiation 22, and testing 23. A complete overview of SBSE with a discussion of future research trends can be found in the recent International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) ‘Future of Software Engineering’ paper 24. This issue of the Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice features three outstanding papers, dealing with different aspects of software maintenance and evolution: release planning and staffing, re-factoring, and component substitution. The paper ‘Optimized Staffing for Product Releases—Focused Search and its Application at Chartwell Technologies’ by Puneet Kapur, An Ngo-The, Günther Ruhe, and Andrew Smith presents an approach for optimizing the staffing for product releases. The problem they solve can be viewed as part of the more general release planning problem, which assigns features to releases such that technical, resource, risk, and budget constraints are met. In particular, the genetic search-based approach the authors propose aims at assigning human resources to software development tasks, taking them from a pool of developers having different levels of skills. The applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated with an industrial case study. The paper ‘Search-Based Refactoring: an Empirical Study’ by Mark O'Keffe and Mel Ó Cinnéide presents an approach to automatically re-factor, using search-based techniques, object-oriented systems that undergo repeated addition of functionality. Such addition can, very often, deteriorate the quality of the system's underlying design. Their re-factoring is guided by the QMOOD quality model 25, and the paper compares different optimization techniques, such as Genetic Algorithms, Simulated Annealing, and Multiple Ascent Hill-Climbing. The results of experiments carried out on five software systems suggest that the latter technique outperforms the others. The paper ‘Search-based Many-to-one Component Substitution’ by Nicolas Desnos, Marianne Huchard, Guy Tremblay, Christelle Urtado, and Sylvain Vauttier presents a search-based approach that allows the replacement of an obsolete component with a composition of multiple components. When a component becomes obsolete, the approach searches for a minimal assembly of other components, exposing their functionality by means of ports that preserves the behavior of the original component. The proposed approach has been evaluated on a set of randomly generated components. We hope that readers will enjoy this special issue and find the selected papers insightful and inspiring. We would like to thank all the authors who presented papers for this special issue: there were many good quality papers, but unfortunately we could accept only three of them. Last, but not the least, we would like to thank the reviewers who provided timely, detailed and constructive feedbacks to the authors. Without their precious help this special issue would not have been possible.

Theory-oriented software engineering

<p>In the current technological scenario of the industry and businesses, there has been increasing need of software within systems and also an increasing demand being put onto software-intensive systems. This in effect will lead to a significant evolution of software engineering processes over the next twenty years. This is due to the fact of emerging technological advancements like Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things in the IT field, among other new developments. This paper addresses and tries to analyses the key research challenges being faced by the software engineering field and articulates information that is derived from the key research specializations within software engineering. The paper analyses the past and current trends in software engineering. The future of software engineering is also looked with respect to Industry 4.0 which including emerging technological platforms like Internet of Things. The societal impact aspect of future trends in software engineering is also addressed in this paper.</p>

: This brochure describes employment opportunities for New Professionals, new college graduates in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, and Electronic Engineering. The brochure describes the New Professionals Program in addition to providing information about the city of San Diego.

A compiler course with a long-term project is a staple of many undergraduate computer science curricula, and often a cornerstone of a program's applied-engineering component. Software engineering expertise can help a student complete such a course, yet that expertise is often lacking. This problem can be addressed without detracting from the core class materials by integrating a few simple software engineering practices into the course. A domain-specific, risk-driven approach minimizes overhead and reinforces the compiler's material, while treating the project as a "real world" enterprise reinforces key engineering lessons. The method might be called "syntax-directed software engineering," being driven by specification centered around a BNF-style grammar. Engineering lessons are reinforced with general engineering principles and contextualization of the subject matter. The approach can be taught without substantial software engineering background. The domain-specific risk-driven software engineering approach can be applied in other courses such as operating systems by redesigning the practices around its domain.

Abstract. Computational models play an increasingly vital role in scientific research by enabling the numerical simulation of complex processes. Such models are also fundamental in geosciences. For instance, they offer critical insights into the impacts of global change on the Earth system today and in the future. Beyond their value as research tools, models are also software products and should therefore adhere to certain established software engineering standards. However, scientists are rarely trained as software developers, which can lead to potential deficiencies in software quality like unreadable, inefficient, or erroneous code. The complexity of models, coupled with their integration into broader workflows, also often makes it challenging to reproduce results, evaluate processes, and build upon them. In this paper, we review the state and current practices of the development processes of the state-of-the-art land surface models used by the Global Carbon Budget. We combine the experience of modelers from the respective research groups with the expertise of software engineers from tech companies to outline key principles and tools for improving software quality in research. We explore four main areas: (1) model testing and validation, (2) scientific, technical, and user documentation, (3) version control, continuous integration, and code review, and (4) the portability and reproducibility of workflows. Our review reveals that while modeling communities are incorporating many best practices, significant room for improvement remains in areas such as automated testing, automated documentation, and reproducibility. Therefore, we here identify and promote essential software engineering practices, including numerous examples of practices from within the community that can serve as guidelines for other models and could help streamline processes across the entire community. We conclude with an open-source example implementation of these principles, demonstrating portable and reproducible data flows, a continuous integration setup, and web-based visualizations. This example may serve as a practical resource for model developers, users, and all scientists engaged in scientific programming.

Introduction and Vision I am honored to be taking over as Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions of Software Engineering (TSE). Jeff Kramer will be a hard act to follow, but I am immensely grateful to him for handing over the journal in such a healthy state, and for helping me learn the new job to ensure a smooth transition. It goes without saying that my primary goal as Editor is to maintain the journal’s reputation and standing as the leading forum for publishing the highest quality of research in software engineering. However, these are exciting and changing times in the world of publishing and in the discipline of software engineering, and I believe that TSE must lead the way by finding innovative ways to disseminate software engineering research and by contributing to setting and reflecting the research agenda in the field. To this end I have three medium term goals for my tenure as Editor: 1. To reemphasize the broad scope of the journal, encouraging the publication of multidisciplinary research as well as specialization in software engineering. 2. To engage with the software engineering community at large, including other journals, about the software engineering discipline, using not only the journal itself as a forum but through other professional outlets such as conferences and the web. 3. To support a debate on the nature of scholarly discourse in software engineering, such as the kind and length of papers published in the journal, or the different forms of peer review and discussion around what is published. Tactics The length of papers published in TSE has on occasion been a topic for some discussion. I do not propose to change the policy in this area but to clarify it, as I think it hides a number of issues within it. TSE publishes papers of any length, as long as their length is appropriate for the content presented. The discussion has often centered around what to do if accepted papers are over the IEEE Computer Society’s recommended length of 15 pages. However, there is an equally interesting discussion to be had for short papers. My view is this: There is nothing sacred about the length of a software engineering research contribution. Substantial pieces of work may need lengthy and detailed accounts of techniques, or of empirical studies or other kinds of evidence; but equally valuable results may be published in short papers. Indeed, other disciplines manage to publish seminal results in four pages. I will continue to be guided by my associate editors as to what constitutes an appropriate length for any particular contribution. I believe that we, as a community, have largely won the battle of persuading our deans and managers that publishing in conferences is a respectable form of publication. However, in a world of economic difficulties, carbon footprint consciousness, and fast internet-time publication, there is a strong case to be made that we need to redress the balance and publish more of our research in journals. Indeed, I would go as far as saying that many research students now go through their entire doctoral studies publishing in workshops and conferences only, and think that all research contributions can fit into the 2-column, 10-page format of IEEE conference publications. As a result, other than their PhD dissertations, these students do not get an opportunity to publish their work in an archival journal format. Of course, the frequency of conference reviewing has also had an impact on the nature of reviews that referees are asked to write. With little scope for improving conference papers before publication and heavy referee review loads, reviews tend to be short critiques of papers, rather than substantive engagements with the content that authors are trying to present. I therefore believe that journal reviews and revision allow for better quality work to be produced incrementally and then published. Of course, the journal publication process is not without cost to authors, referees, and editors, and we need to acknowledge this and tackle it head on. I was very taken by the discussion by Crowcroft et al. [1] on the varying incentives of the different stakeholders in the publication process: authors, referees, and editors. For TSE, the kind of behavior I would like to incentivize is for authors to submit innovative, rigorous, and well-presented accounts of their research and not overload the system with half-baked ideas or very small increments on previous work. I would like to incentivize referees to agree to review papers and to produce rigorous, thoughtful reviews. And, I would like to incentivize editors to seek and encourage submission of a wider range of contributions that will serve our research and practitioner community better. I have no magic to generate these incentives. However, in a year’s time TSE will make a number of awards to authors, referees, and (associate) editors to acknowledge the quality of research, feedback, and editing. I welcome feedback from the community on the specification of such awards.

Welcome to ICSE 2002, the Twenty-Fourth International Conference on Software Engineering!This year, besides the 3 keynotes, 48 papers, 3 panels, 9 industry papers, 2 invited industry presentations, 2 state-of-the-art talks, 3 impact talks, 8 posters, and 3 informal demonstrations in the main ICSE conference, we have 16 tutorials, 14 workshops, 2 symposia and 1 co-located event. These proceedings represent a snapshot in history on the state of the art and state of the practice of software engineering.While the road to ICSE was complicated by events taking place around the world, the unfortunate need to relocate does not detract from the outstanding opportunity we all have to share ideas and experiences and to foster new relationships with members of our profession.It Takes 2 to TangoWhile all software engineers may be accused of dancing to the beat of different drummers, one could speculate which dance partner they might want to select: • industrial applied software engineers and academic researchers in software engineering? • software engineers and systems engineers? • software engineers and information technologists? • software engineers and computer scientists?The point I am trying to make is that this year's ICSE brings together all of the above combinations and facilitates a synergistic environment for all attendees.Research is a community endeavor. ICSE is the premier generalist conference in software engineering research, encompassing all major subfields of software engineering. It plays a vital role in maintaining and developing the research community through exchange of ideas, development of a research agenda and setting standards for quality research.303 full research papers were submitted to ICSE 2002, of which 45 (less than 15reviewing and selectivity make publication in ICSE an honor for authors of selected papers, and ensures attendees and readers a selection of the best current research in software engineering.A program committee of experts drawn from around the world and across the spectrum of software engineering research were responsible for selecting a program of high quality technical papers and providing constructive criticism to authors of all submissions, whether selected or not. ICSE program committee members commit to a very heavy load of reviewing, made heavier this year by a review period that was shortened when we postponed the paper submission deadline by a week due to the tragic events of September 11. Each submitted paper was reviewed by three or more members of the program committee. The final selection was made in a lively two day, face-to-face meeting of the full committee. We are grateful to the ICSE 2002 program committee for magnificent work under difficult conditions, and we are proud of the result they have achieved.

The article provides a brief analysis of the current state of the study of cloud technologies by future software engineers at foreign and Ukrainian universities. The author experience in the application of cloud technologies in the training of future software engineers in Ukraine is presented. The application of cloud business automation systems, online services to monitor the implementation of the software projects, Google services for collaboration, planning and productivity while studying professional disciplines and carrying out diploma projects is described. Based on the survey conducted at Stackoverflow, the state of application of cloud technologies by software engineers around the world has been analyzed. The cloud technologies that are not studied at the analyzed universities of Ukraine and those that are not popular with software developers in the world, but studied at Ukrainian universities by future software engineers are outlined. Conclusions are made on the modernization of training programs for future software engineers. Topics for the study of cloud technologies by future software engineers in the content of professional disciplines are proposed.

According to Computing Research Association, during each year between 2003 and 2007, fewer than 3% of the US's Ph.D.s graduates in computer science and computer engineering were Hispanic or African American and fewer than 20% were women. Such an under-representation precludes the benefits of diversity in computer sciences research and industry and consequently compromises the competitiveness of the US economy. It is therefore imperative that undergraduate institutions introduce students from these groups to research at an early stage of their academic careers and to provide them with the tools necessary for success in graduate school. The School of Computing and Information Sciences (SCIS) at Florida International University (FIU) has been working to strengthen the pipeline of underrepresented students to graduate work in computer science by hosting an NSF sponsored Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site for the past three years. Our REU site has hosted 30 undergraduate students, 23 of them were underrepresented including 8 females, 16 Hispanics, and 4 African Americans, who published 13 technical papers. Six of the ten students who have already graduated, have started their graduate studies.

Artificial intelligence and recent advances in deep learning architectures, including transformer networks and large language models, change the way people think and act to solve problems. Software engineering, as an increasingly complex process to design, develop, test, deploy, and maintain large-scale software systems for solving real-world challenges, is profoundly affected by many revolutionary artificial intelligence tools in general and machine learning in particular. In this roadmap for artificial intelligence in software engineering, we highlight the recent deep impact of artificial intelligence on software engineering by discussing successful stories of applications of artificial intelligence to classic and new software development challenges. We identify the new challenges that the software engineering community has to address in the coming years to successfully apply artificial intelligence in software engineering, and we share our research roadmap toward the effective use of artificial intelligence in the software engineering profession, while still protecting fundamental human values. We spotlight three main areas that challenge the research in software engineering: the use of generative artificial intelligence and large language models for engineering large software systems, the need of large and unbiased datasets and benchmarks for training and evaluating deep learning and large language models for software engineering, and the need of a new code of digital ethics to apply artificial intelligence in software engineering.