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The article introduces the September 2000 issue of the journal, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. The importance of exception handling is well-recognized by system designers and software engineers. Exception handling is very often the most important part of the system because it deals with abnormal situations. This special issue of the journal concentrates on exception handling. Out of 39 submissions of paper on exception handling 9 articles were selected for publication in this journal. These papers represent the important research directions and issues in exception handling in a broad range of disciplines, such as operating system, programming languages, workflow systems and spreadsheet programs. This special issue is published in two parts. The first part includes papers which focus on traditional issues which focus on traditional issues related to programming languages, program design testing and empirical studies.

The article introduces to papers about empirical software engineering (ESE) included in the July 1999 issue of the journal "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering." The paper "Evaluating Emerging Software Development Technologies: Lessons Learned From Assessing Aspect-Oriented Programming," by authors G.C. Murphy, R.J. Walker and E.L.A Baniassad focuses on the need to develop ways of providing cost-effective and timely results. The paper "Building Knowledge Through Families of Experiments," by authors V.R. Basili, F. Shull and F. Lanubile describes the way in which the research community might build a body of knowledge in ESE through similar studies and replication of phenomena of interest, in this case software reading techniques. Another paper "Ginger 2: An Environment for CAESE," by authors K. Torii, K.-I. Matsumoto, K. Nakakoji, Y. Takada, S. Takada and K. Shima looks behind the individual empirical study, in this case, to the infrastructure that might be created to enable the packaging of experimental processes. The authors described a laboratory environment and suite of hardware and software that enables a particular type of laboratory experimentation which can be used to address questions associated with individual work around programming.

The article introduces the December 12, 1998 issue of the journal, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. In the context of software and systems engineering, work in scenario management has so far been fragmented. Therefore a call for papers for a special issue of this journal on scenario management was published. The goal was to produce a collection of some of the major research efforts on scenario management, taking a broad view of what is or should be relevant to software and systems engineering. In order to draw scenario research and practice from different reference disciplines closer together, the CREWS ESPRIT Long Term Research Project of the European Communities organized an interdisciplinary workshop on scenario management, held in Germany. The first three issue of the journal describe some of the components of a scenario-based approach developed in the CREWS project. The following three papers investigate scenarios themselves as formal objects, from which more abstract knowledge is derived by formal reasoning techniques.

By the time the author took office as the editor-in-chief of the journal "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering," last year, the IEEE Computer Society had decided to centralize the paperwork for the journal, at the Society's Los Alamitos, California, office. The Society hired new staff to process the submissions when they found the process to be more labor-intensive than expected. As a result, additional staff are being brought on board. A recurring comment the author had to face after taking charge as editor-in-chief of the journal is that it should contain more relevant information that could be used by software engineering practitioners. He made it a central issue at an editorial board meeting of the journal. The author is, therefore making it a goal of his term to see more articles that are relevant to practitioners published in the journal. In addition to research articles, publishers of the journal are encouraging the submission of articles that focus on the interests and needs of the practicing professional. The journal is inviting papers that describe results of original, basic or applied research and experiences gained from industrial case studies.

Software pervades the growing web of computers and communications systems providing diverse services, personal, commercial, financial, public, and entertainment services. Providing timely, cost-effective, high-quality software for these diverse services requires the best possible technology and practice that the software engineering community can provide. The 1999 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) was held in Los Angeles, California. Following the lead of previous ICSE conferences, the aim of ICSE held in the year 1999 was to bring together software engineering practitioners and researchers to present and discuss the most promising approaches for meeting the software challenges of the next century. The February 2001, issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering presents a special section with some of the best papers of the conference held in the year 1999. These papers were selected through an additional review process conducted after the conference. The ICSE '99 program committee selected a number of the best quality papers. The authors of these papers were invited to submit extended versions of their papers for consideration for journal publication.

A transfer of technology into the mainstream systems development is slowly but surely taking place. FM '99, the First World Congress on Formal Methods in the Development of Computing Systems, was a measure of this new-found maturity. It brought together an impressive array of industrial and applications oriented papers that show how formal methods have been used to tackle real problems. Proceedings are published as volume 1708 and 1709 in Springer-Verlag's, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. These proceedings are a record of the technical symposium of FM '99, along side papers describing applications of formal methods, you will find technical reports, papers, and abstracts, detailing new advances in formal techniques, from mathematical foundations to practical tools. Proceedings contain over one hundred papers and 12 of them are published in three journals, Formal Aspects of Computing, Formal Methods in Systems Design, and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Paper selected are among the best submitted to FM '99, and were subject to rigorous second review process involving leading international academic and industrial researchers.

The article presents guest editorial, published in the May 2000 issue of the periodical "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering," vol. 26, no. 5. The Fifth International Conference on Software Reuse that was held in Victoria B.C., Canada, included papers, mini-workshops, panels, and tutorials dedicated to various aspects of the software reuse enterprise, software architecture, and reuse over the Internet. Out of the 31 papers that were presented, a select few were nominated by the program committee as representing special, innovative contributions. In addition to that the article presents information on the two papers related to major technological approaches to software reuse. The first paper, considers the problem of selecting the best realizations and algorithms for a general purpose data structure. The second paper, is concerned with the problem of adapting class libraries for specific requirements.

This article presents information on articles published in September 1999 issue of the journal "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering." Computer systems are used to perform many critical tasks, including guiding aircraft, scheduling railroads, assisting in surgery, controlling nuclear reactors, performing financial transactions and supporting military command and control. Although the study of these properties evolved as separate disciples, they have in common the fact that a user must have a high degree of confidence in the service that the system delivers. The first research paper in this issue of the journal considers the problem of electing a leader in a distributed system that may become partitioned. Since the partitions will not be able to communicate with each other, it is necessary to elect a leader for each partition. The second research paper addresses the problem of developing an accurate fault model that can be used to evaluate the dependability of a system. The third paper presents an approach to the quantitative evaluation of the security of operational systems.

One of the main goals of software engineering is to provide methods to master complexity by practitioning large software systems into simpler components that can be addressed separately. A number of methods and techniques, distilled from experience and best practices, have been published in the literature to help software engineers in the application of the principle of divide and conquer to software systems development. A complex system can be characterized as a system whose properties cannot be studied by suitably decomposing it into components, but rather depend heavily on the interactions among such components. Some systems are inherently complex, that is, there is no way to identify components that simplify the analysis, in other cases, complexity may derive from the current lack of knowledge or experience, especially when new technologies are introduced and new application areas are discovered. The papers selected for this special section of the January/February issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, are representative of the ideas presented at the IEEE International Conference on Engineering Complex Computer Systems, held in Como, Italy. This special section presents four papers selected from those presented at the conference.

The article presents an editorial that reflects on the author's role as editor-in-chief of the journal "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering." He remarks that the journal encourages those involved in the field of software engineering to submit manuscripts for publication. There is no longer a length limit to papers published in the journal. The reviewing process for submitted papers is discussed. The author discusses members of the journal's editorial board and offers his thanks to those who have helped in his role at the journal.

This article reports that several changes in the periodical "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering," published as of February 01, 2004, will make the processing of articles more timely and more effective. First, the length restriction on submitted manuscripts has been removed. This should allow authors to document results in appropriate length papers. Despite the change, authors are encouraged to keep papers as short as possible. Second, Transactions on Software Engineering manuscript management has been moved to the Web-based Manuscript Central system. This system makes all aspects of manuscript processing much more efficient and it allows everybody involved in processing papers, including authors, to obtain details of the state of manuscripts as they are processed. Third, preprints in the future will be available online two months before the issue cover date. Software remains a critical industry to the world. The impact of software is tremendous, both when it works and when it doesn't.

The article presents editorial, published in January 2002 issue of the software engineering journal IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Outgoing editor-in-chief Anneliese A. Andrews said that it has been both a joy and a privilege to serve as editor-in-chief of the journal for the last two years. When she started in January 2000, the journal had al long backlog of papers to be published. She noted that on an average, the reviews were timely published, there were outliers, papers that had not been reviewed inn timely manners. Journalists depend on the volunteers' service of the Associate editors and the reviewers. She thanked all who have contributed generously to make the review process thorough, high quality and timely and who helped to ensure the continued high quality of papers. She said that she had the pleasure to work with a dedicated, excellent publication staff. They made sure that issues were published on time, provided timely reporting so that she could act proactively.

It is a pleasure to introduce and welcome four new members to the Editorial Board of 'IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering'---Annie I. Anton, Paul Clements, Neil Maiden, and Barbara Gershon Ryder. Their brief biographical sketches below present their accomplishments, expertise, and interests. The role of the editorial board is very important and being a member of the board is challenging and time consuming. The members of the board are responsible for selecting reviewers for papers submitted to the journal and for making publication decisions. Many of them also assist in the preparation of various special issues. The board also engages in regular discussion about policy issues facing the journal. These activities are undertaken voluntarily and coexist with existing professional responsibilities. Annie I. Anton received the BS degree in 1990 with a minor in technical and business communication, the MS degree in 1992, and the PhD degree in 1997 with a minor in management and public policy. Paul Clements the BS degree in mathematical sciences in 1977, and the MS degree in computer science in 1980, both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The article presents an introduction to the special section related to International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'97), published in the August 1998 issue of the journal "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering." Authors say that ICSE was held in Boston Massachusetts, in the week of May 17-23, 1997. The main goal of the conference was to meet needs and expectations of a large variety of attendees. The program committee of the conference was involved in a comprehensive reviewing process of papers submitted. At the end of this process, three papers were selected for publication. In the first paper, "Evaluating Testing Methods by Delivered Reliability," researchers discuss a method for evaluating the effectiveness of testing, based on a measure of the program reliability after testing. The second paper "Analyzing Partially Implemented Real-Time System," presents a technique for analyzing partially-implemented real-time systems. The third paper "Communication Metrics for Software Development," discusses results of comprehensive experiment whose goal was to evaluate the effectiveness of a set of communication metrics.

The article presents an introduction of article of a special section published in the September 1998 issue of the journal "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering." The author says that this special section contains extended versions three papers presented at the joint meeting of the Sixth European Software Engineering Conference (ESEC) and Fifth ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), held at Zurich, Switzerland in September 1997. The program committee selected 27 papers out of the 194 submitted. ESEC and FSE conferences cover a broad range of topics in software engineering and have a highly technical focus. The first paper "A C++ Data Model Supporting Reachability Analysis and Dead Code Detection," discusses a C++ data model that is the foundation of many program analysis tools. The second paper "Integration of Sequential Scenarios," deals with scenarios that are used to document user-system interactions in system requirements and functional specifications. The third paper "Subtypes for Specifications: Predicate Subtyping in PVS," uses examples to show the utility of predicate subtypes in the specification language program verification system.

The Symposium on Foundations in Software Engineering is an annual conference sponsored by Association for Computing Machinery, a computer portal and dedicated to the presentation of innovative research results contributing to an engineering discipline for software systems. This special section of the July 1998 issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering features three of the best papers from the fourth symposium, held in October 1996 in San Francisco, California. During its first half-decade, research results presented at this conference have covered engineering research topics. However, a number of distinguishing properties tend to characterize the best of the papers and have helped set the standards for high-quality software engineering research. The three papers in this special section illustrate these properties. One of the critical challenges for software engineering research is to find practical tools that help system builder restructure existing systems. Mark Moriconi was general chair for the symposium and deserves considerable credit for its success.

The editorial introduces the new Editor-in-Chief of the "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering" journal, Jeff Kramer, professor in the Department of Computing at the Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine in London, England. The status of the journal is discussed, including gratitude for the creativity displayed in the 341 papers received in 2005. The future of the software industry is discussed, along with difficulties in improving reliability and lowering production cost.

The article presents editorial, published in January 2002 issue of the software engineering journal IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Editor-in-Chief John Knight thanked the outgoing Editor-in-Chief for her efforts over past two years and said that under her leadership the journal has progressed well. It takes a large group of dedicated people to make the journal a success. Some of those people, the editorial board and the authors of the published papers are quite visible. The reviewers are only visible as a group. Other publication staffs are far less visible. He concluded that all these groups are essential for journal's health and growth. He thanked persons who are involved with the journal. The present strength of the journal is an opportunity to develop and enhance it further. He said that he will be working with the editorial board to seek ways of soliciting further submission and widening the circulation.

This article introduces associate editors of the journal "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering." These associate editors are backbone of the journal. They are ultimately the ones that ensure the high quality of the paper the journal publishes. Manfred Broy is a professor of computing science at the Technical University of Munich. His research interests are software and systems engineering comprising both theoretical and practical aspects. Gerardo Canfora is currently an associate professor of computer science in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sannio in Benevento, Italy. Gianfranco Ciardo received a PhD degree in computer science from Duke University in 1989. He is an associate professor of computer science at the college of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. Michael Reiter received a PhD degree in computer science from Cornell University in 1991 and 1993. Currently he is head of the department of Secure Systems Research Department in Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies.