The Impact Project: Determining the Impact of Software Engineering Research upon Practice

Association Computing Machinery, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

The Impact Project: Determining the Impact of Software Engineering Research upon Practice The goal of the Impact Project, an international collaboration among U.S. and European Union software engineers, is to study the impact that software engineering research has had upon software development practice. The reasons for doing this include: identifying contributions that have had substantial impact, determining research modalities that have been relatively more successful, and anticipating the directions that software engineering research might most effectively pursue, based upon its history and positioning. Impact Project research will be useful to the software engineering research and development communities, as well as to other academic disciplines, government funding agencies, and the public at large in helping with the objective assessment of the software engineering community's record of achievement. The project is to be carried out as a special initiative of ACM SIGSOFT, which will provide partial support. The research work is to be coordinated by steering committee, led by an Executive Committee. The work itself will have two organizational thrusts: 1) to seek on a technology-by-technology basis, the source of the ideas, designs, and working prototypes of widely used software technologies, and 2) to examine the ways in which software engineering research directions and areas have stimulated or been amalgamated into commonly used technologies. The output of the project will be series of documents and briefings targeted to different audiences.