Proceedings of the the 6th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering

After more than two years preparation and thanks to the work of a team of more than 60 people (not counting authors and external reviewers), the day has arrived and we are thrilled to welcome you to ESEC/FSE'07, the 6th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. We hope you will enjoy the rich and exciting program resulting from this team effort, which is conveyed in these two-volume Proceedings. The main volume includes the traditional research track, with 42 highest quality papers selected by the ESEC/FSE Program Committee among the record number of 251 submissions (with a resulting acceptance rate of 16.7%). The selection followed a two-phase process, according to which all accepted papers passed through two consecutive review stages, receiving at least three independent reviews, in several cases four or more. For drawing final decisions, the whole PC met in Minneapolis on May 25-27, discussing around one hundred papers. Among these, the PC also selected twenty nice-idea works for Poster exhibition, two of which have then been withdrawn by the authors, resulting in the eighteen short papers included in the companion volume. We have probably signed another record with the most dynamic PC composition: during the journey seven of the 33 originally appointed researchers left the group for differing force-majeure causes (the nicest ones are two new babies arriving). ESEC/FSE PC duties include the mandatory participation to the paper selection meeting, and members who could not attend it had to resign. The decrease of PC size resulted in an augmented reviewing workload for the remaining members, who reviewed up to 25 submissions each; the best gratification to this hard work are the several positive feedback messages received from authors of rejected papers for the competent and informative reviews. We are highly grateful to all PC members for their effort and dedication, and to all the many additional reviewers for their indispensable support; among the latter a special thank to Bran Selic (ex-PC member who resigned after reviewing his assigned papers in both phases). The main volume also includes papers of the invited presentations, featuring the opening keynote talk by Roberto Siagri, President and CEO of Eurotech, who envisages how the computers of the next future will be hidden everywhere into the surrounding environment to provide us with an augmented reality, that he calls a "Computational Exoskeleton". The 2007 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award recipient is Elaine Weyuker from ATT based on her five-years experience with investigating fault patterns in large systems, she focuses on the complete path for doing good Software Engineering research, all along from problem inception to eventually packaging the results and making them accessible to practitioners. The main conference program also includes a tribute to Dean Rosenzweig, Professor at Zagreb University, who recently passed away, presented by Andre Scedrov from the University of Pennsylvania, and an outline of next-coming opportunities in the seventh Framework Program by Paolo Bresciani, Project Officer of the European Commission. The companion volume to ESEC/FSE offers a rich selection of other related events. To the benefit of all ESEC/FSE attendees, we decided this year not to have as by tradition a separate tutorials track, but rather to package within the main program a series of State-of-the-Art (SOTA) presentations on up-to-date Software Engineering themes provided by leading researchers: Steffen Staab from the University of Koblenz-Landau overviews ontology technologies and the Semantic web, Marta Kwiatkowska from Oxford University presents probabilistic model checking, and Walt Scacchi from University of California, Irvine, reviews free and open source software development. Another novelty launched this year is the Widened Software Engineering (WISE) track, which explicitly aims at widening international participation. The main program is preceded by eight focused Workshops on advanced research themes, for which a short summary is provided by the organizers of each workshop, and by the traditional Doctoral Symposium, of which we include extended abstracts. The location of ESEC/FSE 2007 could not be more charming: we meet in Cavtat near Dubrovnik in the beautiful Croatia region. The social program includes a boat trip to the welcome reception held at the historical place Sponza Palace in the old city of Dubrovnik, a Unesco World Heritage site, and the conference dinner on the Lido terrace of the Croatia Hotel, with an astonishing view on the sea, the Cavtat peninsula and Dubrovnik on the horizon. Finally, for the many Software Engineering passionate runners, we are proud to announce a primer: the SE.run( ) 5/10k Race.