Foreword



On behalf of the Organizing Committee and Program Committee of the 12th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE’2001), we would like to welcome you to Hong Kong, the city in the heart of Asia where East meets West and where modernization intertwines with tradition. This is also the first time in it’s 12 year history that ISSRE is held in Asia. The theme of this year’s symposium is “Software Reliability Engineering for Internet and E-commerce Applications.”


ISSRE’2001 is sponsored by both IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Reliability Society. It begins with a day of Tutorials, followed by three days of the core conference. The core conference includes the Industry Day where a number of presentations from Industry are presented, and the Refereed Paper Track, where the papers in this volume are presented. On the Tutorials Day the first Workshop on Software Assessment (WOSA) will also be held.


The lure of Hong Kong and the great work of our program committee to encourage submissions resulted in a substantial increase in submitted papers over last year. We had close to 100 submissions for refereed regular papers, from which we accepted 38 papers, giving us an acceptance rate slightly lower than 40%, down from the acceptance rate of the past ISSREs.


The tremendous task of getting high quality reviews for the variety of papers submitted to ISSRE’2001 was accomplished by a formidable 45-member Program Committee and additional reviewers. Some Organizing Committee members were also invited to review the papers. The number of reviews per paper increased substantially this year. Each submitted paper was assigned and reviewed by at least 3 Program Committee or Organizing Committee members. You can see the large number of people who contributed to this effort by looking at the Organizing Committee and Program Committee lists in the Conference Organizer section of this proceedings and the conference website <http://www.issre2001.org/>. The final decision on all the papers was made at a two-day Program Committee meeting, held this year in Washington D.C in July 20-21. 40 members from the Program Committee and Organizing Committee participated.


In addition to refereed regular papers, ISSRE’2001 highlights four excellent keynote speakers. They are: Terrence Heng, Senior VP, Motorola; Steve McConnell, CEO, Construx Software; Kalyana Rao, Executive VP and CTO, Satyam Computers Services Ltd.; and Dalibor F. Vrsalovic, President, Intel On-line Services Inc. There are also 16 Industry Presentations from US Airforce, NIST, Motorola, IBM Research, Cisco Systems, Korea Advanced Institute, Hitachi Ltd, and Sony Corporation, etc. In addition, 4 panel sessions, 21 Fast Abstracts, and 13 Student Poster papers will be presented in ISSRE’2001. Most of these contents will appear in an ISSRE’2001 Supplementary Proceedings. In conclusion, ISSRE'2001 program includes 100 presentations of various disciplines and topics surrounding the subject of software reliability engineering.

 

All of the people listed on the Conference Committee page have contributed much hard work to the success of ISSRE’2001. Please take a minute to go over that list. We would personally like to thank Sam Sze of the Chinese University of Hong Kong for an excellent management of the conference website and the production of the Advance Program, and Grace Tong of the Chinese University of Hong Kong for administrative support for ISSRE’2001: meeting coordination, minutes compilation, and conference operation and book-keeping support. Frances Titsworth of IEEE Computer Society put in the effort to produce the proceedings you now hold in your hands. Susan Donohue of the University of Virginia helped organize the program committee meeting. Finally, as with all large endeavors run on volunteer labor, each of the conference organizers had a personal support system of loved ones and friends who contributed and sacrificed to make ISSRE’2001 possible. A great appreciation to all of them!

 

We hope you are able to take advantage the result of all our labors for ISSRE’2001, which offers technical contents in breath as well as depth. We encourage you to explore the surrounding atmosphere, both during the conference, and outside of the conference in Hong Kong!

Michael Rung-Tsong Lyu, ISSRE’2001 General Chair
Joanne Bechta Dugan, ISSRE’2001 Program co-Chair
Aad van Moorsel, ISSRE’2001 Program co-Chair