ICSE

Willkommen/bienvenues/welcome to the 2008 Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories in Leipzig, Germany!

This year marks the debut of MSR as a Working Conference, after four successful years as ICSE's largest workshop. During this time, our research community has grown significantly. We have seen tremendous advances in the depth and scope of the kinds of research questions we are investigating. Furthermore, we have also expanded the breadth of MSR into areas such as social network analysis and visualization. So what does is mean to be a working conference this year? It means that the maturity of the work and the quality of the papers have made MSR a venue of choice for research in this area. And MSR is a working conference, not just a static repository of dry research results. We will continue to hold discussions as being central to the mission of the MSR event. We will continue to accept short papers whose novelty stirs discussion. And we will continue to hold the MSR challenge, where researchers participate in a qualitative competition, using their own techniques to attack a common problem.

This year, the timing was much tighter than we might have liked, requiring a very short turnaround for authors from the announced CFP to the final submission deadline. The tight schedule also put a burden on the program committee, who responded magnificently! The call for papers attracted 42 submissions (21 full papers and 21 short papers) from Germany, Canada, USA, Switzerland, UK, Japan, Spain, the Netherlands, Austria, Greece, the Czech Republic, and India. Eight of the 21 full papers were accepted as such, and another four were accepted as short papers. Twelve of the 21 short paper submissions were also accepted.

We are very pleased to offer two invited talks this year. First, Prof. Carlo Ghezzi of the Politechnico di Milano will give a keynote address entitled: Dynamically Evolving Software: Some Radical Changes of Perspective. Our second day will lead off with an invited tutorial by Prof. Abraham (Avi) Bernstein of the University of Zürich on data mining and machine learning. In addition to the papers and discussion sessions, we have a session devoted to this year's MSR Mining Challenge.