Welcome to the ACM SIGSOFT Blog!
On behalf of the ACM SIGSOFT Executive Committee (EC), I am excited to launch this blog, as a way to enhance the communication between the SIGSOFT EC and the software engineering community, create a sense of community within SIGSOFT, and publicise software engineering and SIGSOFT activities to the outside world.
I am Cristian Cadar, a Professor of Software Reliability at Imperial College London and a Member-at-Large in the SIGSOFT EC. I feel privileged to act as the first “Editor-in-Chief” of the SIGSOFT Blog.
Main Objectives of the Blog
The SIGSOFT Blog has several different objectives.
First, to act as a discussion forum for the SIGSOFT community: debate issues relevant to the software engineering community, such as publication models and conference organisation; communicate and debate major decisions from the SIGSOFT EC; and discuss new initiatives, particularly SIGSOFT-sponsored ones.
Second, the blog aims to introduce readers to different software engineering research themes and software engineering activities. Software engineering is a broad field, and SIGSOFT promotes all activities related to software development and maintenance, ranging from requirements and specifications to design, architecture and processes to testing, debugging and verification, to mention just a few areas. Such a broad field is naturally subject to fragmentation, and the SIGSOFT Blog aims to better connect the different software engineering communities.
Finally, the blog aims to promote software engineering contributions and SIGSOFT activities to the outside world — e.g., other communities of researchers and practitioners.
The SIGSOFT Blog is meant to complement the SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (SEN). I have already had some productive discussions with Jacopo Soldani, the SEN EiC, and Tom Zimmermann, the SIGSOFT Chair, about the relationship between these two SIGSOFT forums.
Call for Contributions
The success of the blog lies in its contributions. Besides the posts from the SIGSOFT EC, we invite both technical and non-technical contributions from the software engineering community.
Technical posts should be high-level, accessible to a general technical audience, including but not limited to software engineering researchers and practitioners. In particular, we will generally not accept posts discussing individual papers (with very few exceptions, such as papers winning test-of-time awards) and expect posts to cover more than just the authors’ own work.
Non-technical posts should debate issues relevant to the SIGSOFT community, in a respectful way. They will likely cover aspects related to conference organisation, publication models, equality, diversity and equality, recent technical news and community awards, among many others.
We will operate a mix of invited and contributed blog posts. All blog posts are approved by the editorial board, which will be announced soon. The editorial process is meant to improve the quality of the posts and ensure they are relevant to a broad audience. In general, the process will resemble a journal submission, possibly consisting of several iterations. We will largely adopt the guidelines and policies from the SIGPLAN Blog, slightly adapted for a SIGSOFT context. We will publish them in the next post.
I am looking forward to reading about your research ideas and research overviews, reflections on current topics of interest to the community, interviews, summaries of notable software engineering events, software development practices, teaching ideas, and many more.
Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with your ideas and feedback, and of course your contributions!
Acknowledgements: I would like to offer my special thanks to Michael Hicks, Jeff Foster, Todd Millstein, and Adrian Sampson for sharing their experience with the SIGPLAN blog. I would also like to thank my colleagues in the SIGSOFT EC for valuable discussions about this blog.
Cristian Cadar,
London, 18th March 2022
Disclaimer: The posts in the SIGSOFT Blog are written by individual contributors and any views or opinions represented in their posts are personal, belong solely to the blog authors and do not necessarily represent those of ACM SIGSOFT or ACM.
