ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award

The ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award is presented annually to the author(s) of a paper presented at a SIGSOFT-sponsored or co-sponsored conference held at least 11 years prior to the award year. For the January 15, 2023 deadline, papers published in 2012 or before are eligible. In including all of SIGSOFT's conferences in the competition, this award recognizes the breadth and vitality of the software engineering community. The papers are judged by their influence since their publication. The award includes a $1000 honorarium to be split amongst the authors as they choose, an award plaque for each author, an invitation for the authors to present a keynote talk at the current year's annual ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), as well as inclusion of a full-length paper in the ESEC/FSE conference proceedings. Up to three authors will be provided support for travel to ESEC/FSE, with each receiving up to $2500 within their home continent and up to $3000 outside their home continent, including airfare, hotel, and conference registration for ESEC/FSE.

To submit a nomination for the award, please use the awards nomination portal. Please note that:

An intent to nominate must be submitted in the nomination system by December 15, 2022. The intent submission is very lightweight and only requires: (1) paper title along with the acronym and year of the SIGSOFT-sponsored conference the paper was published, (2) contact information of the nominator, and (3) some metadata. If no intent is received by the deadline, the nomination will be deemed late and not considered for this round of award selection.
A single PDF containing the nomination package must be submitted through the portal to complete the submission by January 15, 2023. The PDF should contain the following information: (1) paper title; (2) authors; (3) name of the SIGSOFT-sponsored conference; (4) year the paper was published; (5) proposed citation (up to 25 words); (6) a succinct statement describing why the paper is impactful (200-500 words).

The selection committee shall have the option to decline to make an award in a given year, if no suitable nominations are presented.

If you have questions about this award, please contact sigsoft-impact-award (at) acm (dot) org.

Winners

2023	Gordon Fraser, and Andrea Arcuri. EvoSuite: Automatic Test Suite Generation for Object-Oriented Software. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering and 13th European Software Engineering Conference (ESEC/FSE 2011, Szeged, Hungary, Sep 2011). "For building EvoSuite, a search-based software testing tool which has a significant community around it."
2022	Mik Kersten, and Gail Murphy. Using Task Context to Improve Programmer Productivity. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (SIGSOFT FSE 2006, Portland, Oregon, Nov 2006). "For pioneering the concept of a task context, which has improved software practice and inspired new research."
2021	Matthew B. Dwyer, George S. Avrunin, and James C. Corbett. Patterns of Property Specifications for Finite-State Verification. In Proceedings of the 21st Internation Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 1999, Los Angeles, California, May 1999). "For enabling widespread use of temporal logic for program verification by raising the level of abstraction to common patterns."
2020	Willem Visser, Klaus Havelund, Guillaume Brat, SeungJoon Park. Model Checking Programs. In Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2000, Grenoble, France, 11-15 Sep 2000).
2019	Koushik Sen, Darko Marinov and Gul Agha. CUTE: A Concolic Unit Testing Engine for C. In Proceedings of the 10th European Software Engineering Conference held jointly with 13th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE-13, Lisbon, Portugal, 5-9 Sep 2005).
2018	Lingxiao Jiang, Ghassan Misherghi, Zhendong Su, and Stephane Glondu. DECKARD: Scalable and Accurate Tree-Based Detection of Code Clones. In Proceedings of the 29th Internation Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '07, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 20-26 May 2007).
2017	Roy T. Fielding and Richard N. Taylor. Principled Design of the Modern Web Architecture. In Proceedings of the 22nd Internation Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '00, Limerick, Ireland, 5-7 June, 2000).
2016	Daniel Jackson and Mandana Vaziri. Finding bugs with a constraint solver. In Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA '00, Portland, Oregon, 22-24 August, 2000).
2015	James A. Jones, Mary Jean Harrold, and John Stasko. Visualization of Test Information to Assist Fault Localization. In ICSE '02: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering (Orlando, Florida, 19-24 May, 2002).
2014	Barbara Kitchenham, Tore Dybå, and Magne Jørgensen. Evidence-Based Software Engineering. In ICSE '04: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering (Edinburgh, Scotland, 23-28 May, 2004).
2013	Michael Ernst, Jake Cockrell, Bill Griswold, and David Notkin. Dynamically Discovering Likely Program Invariants to Support Program Evolution. In ICSE '99: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Software Engineering (Los Angeles, California, 16-22 May, 1999).
2012	Chandrasekhar Boyapati, Sarfraz Khurshid, and Darko Marinov. Korat: Automated Testing Based on Java Predicates. In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (Roma, Italy, 22 - 24 July, 2002).
2011	Luca de Alfaro and Thomas A. Henzinger. Interface automata. In Proceedings of ESEC/FSE-9, the joint 8th European Software Engineering Conference and 9th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (Vienna, Austria, 10 - 14 September, 2001).
2010	James C. Corbett, Matthew B. Dwyer, John Hatcliff, Shawn Laubach, Corina S. Pasareanu, Robby, Hongjun Zheng. Bandera: extracting finite-state models from Java source code. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, 2000.
2009	Andreas Zeller. Yesterday, my program worked. Today, it does not. Why?. In Proceedings of the 7th European Software Engineering Conference Held Jointly with the 7th ACM SIGSOFT international Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (Toulouse, France, 6 - 10 September, 1999). Foundations of Software Engineering. Springer-Verlag, London, 253-267. (Listen to Andreas' Impact Award keynote.)
2008	Rosenblum, D. S. and Wolf, A. L. A design framework for Internet-scale event observation and notification. In Proceedings of the 6th European SOFTWARE ENGINEERING Conference Held Jointly with the 5th ACM SIGSOFT international Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (Zurich, Switzerland, 22 - 25 September, 1997). M. Jazayeri and H. Schauer, Eds. Foundations of Software Engineering. Springer-Verlag New York, New York, NY, 344-360.

Retrospective Awards

Awarded in 2012	Walter F. Tichy. Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Revision Control System. In ICSE '82: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Software Engineering, 1982 Debra J. Richardson, Stephanie Leif Aha and T. Owen O'Malley. Specification-based Test Oracles for Reactive Systems. In ICSE '92: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Software Engineering, 1992 P. Borras, D. Clement, Th. Despeyroux, J. Incerpi, G. Kahn, B. Lang, and V. Pascual. Centaur: the System. In PSDE 3: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN Symposium on Practical Software Development Environments, 1989 J. Magee and J. Kramer. Dynamic Structure in Software Architectures. In FSE 4: Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, 1996 A.M. Zaremski and J. Wing. Specification Matching of Software Components. In FSE 3: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, 1995
Awarded in 2011	Dewayne E. Perry and Alexander L. Wolf. Foundations for the Study of Software Architecture. In ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, vol. 17, no. 4, October 1992. Thomas Reps, Susan Horowitz, Mooly Sagiv and Genevieve Rosay. Speeding Up Slicing. In Proc. Second ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, New Orleans, LA, USA, December 1994. David Garlan, Robert Allen and John Ockerbloom. Architectural Mismatch or Why It's Hard to Build Systems Out of Existing Parts. In Proc. 17th International Conference on Software Engineering, Seattle, WA, USA, April 1995. Gail C. Murphy, David Notkin and Kevin Sullivan. Software Reflexion Models: Bridging the Gap between Source and High-Level Models. In Proc. Third ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, Washington, DC, USA, October 1995.
Awarded in 2010	Thomas Reps and Tim Teitelbaum. The Synthesizer Generator. In SDE 1, Proceedings of the first ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN Software Engineering Symposium on Practical Software Development Environments, 1984. Karl J. Ottenstein and Linda M. Ottenstein. The Program Dependence Graph in a Software Development Environment. In SDE 1, Proceedings of the first ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN Software Engineering Symposium on Practical Software Development Environments, 1984. Robert Balzer. Tolerating Inconsistency. In ICSE '91, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Engineering. David Lorge Parnas. Software Aging. In ICSE '94, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Software Engineering.
Awarded in 2009	T.J. McCabe, A Complexity Measure. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 308-320, July 1976. Rapps, S. and Weyuker, E. J. Data flow analysis techniques for test data selection. In Proceedings of the 6th international Conference on Software Engineering (Tokyo, Japan, September 13 - 16, 1982). International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 272-278. Reiss, S.P., PECAN: Program Development Systems that Support Multiple Views. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol.SE-11, no.3, pp. 276-285. March 1985. Barry W. Boehm, A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancement. Computer, vol. 21, no. 5, pp. 61-72, May 1988. Royce, W. W. Managing the development of large software systems: concepts and techniques. In Proceedings of the 9th international Conference on Software Engineering (Monterey, California, United States). International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 328-338.
Awarded in 2008	Harel, D., Lachover, H., Naamad, A., Pnueli, A., Politi, M., Sherman, R., and Shtul-Trauring, a. STATEMATE: a working environment for the development of complex reactive systems. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Software Engineering (Singapore, April 11 - 15, 1988). International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 396-406. Ungar, D. Generation Scavenging: A non-disruptive high performance storage reclamation algorithm. SIGPLAN Not. 19, 5 -- ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN software engineering symposium on Practical software development environments, (May. 1984), 157-167. Parnas, D. L., Clements, P. C., and Weiss, D. M. The modular structure of complex systems. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Software Engineering (Orlando, Florida, United States, March 26 - 29, 1984). International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, 408-417. Weiser, M. Program slicing. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Software Engineering (San Diego, California, United States, March 09 - 12, 1981). International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, 439-449. Liskov, B., Snyder, A., Atkinson, R., and Schaffert, C. Abstraction mechanisms in CLU. In Proceedings of An ACM Conference on Language Design For Reliable Software (Raleigh, North Carolina, March 28 - 30, 1977). D. B. Wortman, Ed., 140.

Committee

2023

Dongmei Zhang, Microsoft Research Asia, China (chair)
Anders Moller, Aarhus University, Denmark (deputy chair)
Massimiliano Di Penta, University of Sanio, Italy
Zhi Jin, Peking University, China
Yves Le Traon, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Abhik Roychoudhury, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Koushik Sen, University of California-Berkeley, United States
Margaret-Anne Storey, University of Victoria, Canada
Thomas Zimmermann, Microsoft Research, United States (non-voting)
David Lo, Singapore Management University, Singapore (non-voting)

2022

Cristian Cadar, Imperial College London, United Kingdom (chair)
Tevfik Bultan, UC Santa Barbara, United States
Massimiliano Di Penta, University of Sanio, Italy
Anders Moller, Aarhus University, Denmark
Alessandro Orso, Georgia Institute of Technology, United States
Corina Pasareanu, CMU/NASA Ames, United States
Abhik Roychoudhury, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Dongmei Zhang, Microsoft Research Asia, China
Thomas Zimmermann, Microsoft Research, United States (non-voting)
David Lo, Singapore Management University, Singapore (non-voting)

2021

Darko Marinov (chair)
Gordon Fraser, Gordon (dot) Fraser (at) uni-passau (dot) de
Julia Lawall, julia (dot) lawall (at) inria (dot) fr
Minghui Zhou, zhmh (at) pku (dot) edu (dot) cn
Miryung Kim, miryung (at) cs (dot) ucla (dot) edu
Richard Taylor, taylor (at) ics (dot) uci (dot) edu
Willem Visser, willem (at) gmail (dot) com