🚀 go-pugleaf

	 It's interesting noting the professional affiliations of the people
	 organizing this conference:

	 	University:  12
	 	Government: 1
	 	Industrial Research:  2

Exactly what was intended -- it was done on purpose.

	 It bothers me that there are not more people from industry involved
	 with this conference, particularly since the goal is to "help
	 establish software engineering as a viable engineering discipline."
	 After all, practicing software engineers are mostly in industrial
	 settings.

Note the title of the conference:  "Foundations of Software Engineering"
                                    ^^^^^^^^^^^
The reason for starting this conference is to provide a forum for
*researchers* to present and discuss software engineering research results.
ICSE used to provide that forum, but researchers are increasingly unwilling
to submit their papers.  I've been on ICSE program committees where industry
members argued that no paper should be accepted that was not about something
immediately useful and relevant to them, and the papers were rejected.
Researchers are increasingly submitting their papers to conferences and
workshops on specialized topics, which limits the amount of crosstalk
across subfields.

I presented a keynote talk/paper at ICSE in May entitled "High-Pressure
Steam Engines and Computer Software" in which I argued that we need to
establish our scientific foundations, and I was also involved in advocating
the startup of FSE.  To make software engineering into a viable engineering
discipline, we need to build a scientific base and use scientific methods
in our research.  I'm not really sure that this conference will fly since
there are not a lot of people even doing such foundational research -- it
has not been encouraged or such researchers are not willing to say they are
in software engineering anymore.  There is spreading feeling in universities
that software engineering has no hard content, and doctoral students are
being encouraged to work in other areas.   Literally dozens of conferences
exist to provide information for practicing software engineers; let the
researchers have one conference where they do not have to justify the
immediate practicality and applicability of what they are doing.

Nancy Leveson

P.S.  If anyone would like a latex (or dvi) version of my keynote
address, you can get it by anonymous ftp from ics.uci.edu -- it is
in the subdirectory pub/tcas.  The paper has been submitted to CACM
for publication; I would appreciate feedback if you do read it.