Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Software visualization (2006)

Welcome to the third ACM Symposium on Software Visualization, held this year in Brighton, UK. In addition to our program of peer-reviewed technical papers, this year's event has a number of innovations, and we are looking forward to an interesting and action-packed event.Our technical program consists of 14 papers, 25 interactive posters, and 2 presentations. Each paper was rigorously reviewed by three or more reviewers, resulting in acceptance of 36% of the submissions.Our first innovation was with which conference to co-locate. SoftVis is a small and close-knit conference. This year, instead of co-locating as a satellite to a big conference, as in the first two years, we decided to try a different model: co-locating with other small, close-knit conferences with themes related to ours, namely the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, and the PPIG Workshop (Psychology of Programming Interest Group). We gathered as much data as we could about whether attendees at the other conferences might be attracted to SoftVis and vice versa, and after much deliberation, the SoftVis Steering Committee decided to go ahead with it. The VL/HCC Steering Committee and the PPIG Steering Committee were also in favor, and a vision was developed about how these three events could cooperate and contribute to each other.A slightly overlapping schedule among the three conferences with some joint keynotes, a joint reception and joint tea breaks, a poster display intermingled with the joint reception, and a joint special event emerged. A unified registration process was developed. Discounts for joint registrations were figured out by all the General Chairs. John Howse, the General Chair of VL/HCC, graciously volunteered to manage the joint registration and logistics for all three events. We are very grateful to him and to all three Steering Committees for their efforts, good ideas, and willingness to be flexible.Our second innovation was to include a SoftVis Challenge event. SoftVis has not included such an event before. Carsten Gorg agreed to manage the event, and Margaret-Anne Storey s words of experience helped to give it direction. The SoftVis Challenge brings together researchers and practitioners interested in applying, comparing, and challenging their software visualization tools and approaches on software repositories for two common open source projects Mozilla (C,C++) and Eclipse (Java). We are looking forward to hearing what the selected Challenge software visualizations can reveal for these real-world projects.Our third innovation came when the notion was put forward that a joint panel might be a good idea. This is a common device in conferences, but frankly, none of us three actually likes panels. So, we decided to instead try a special event that we thought could provide more direct benefits to attendees: a How to Succeed at SoftVis/VLHCC Research event. As a joint session with VL/HCC, this event will include senior researchers from both the SoftVis and VL/HCC communities giving their own tips on how to succeed at SoftVis and VL/HCC research: how to do it, how to write it, and how to transfer it effectively to industry. It will also include the audience itself, from whom additional tips that have worked for them will be shared with the others.These innovations seem to be paying off. As of the time of this writing (two months before the event, and before the early registration deadline), the early SoftVis registrations have already surpassed last year's final total. Further, registrants are showing strong enthusiasm for this collection of conferences together: a full 50% of the SoftVis attendees also registered at VL/HCC, PPIG, or both.Welcome to SoftVis, and to VL/HCC and PPIG as well. We hope you enjoy them and your stay in Brighton, and we look forward to your feedback on this year's innovations.