My ICSE experience

ICSE is more than often regarded as the most prominent conference in Software Engineering, “the hippest conference under the sky” and as a final year master student in Software Engineering, for me participating at ICSE 2013 was a dream come true. Thanks to the ACM-W scholarship I was part of the ICSE community and I hope to stay within that for many years more to come. I additionally received a complementary registration from SIGSOFT.

My strongest interests lie in Empirical Software Engineering and in fact my ICSE experience started with the CESI workshop (Conducting Empirical Studies in Industry). I fully enjoyed the keynote of Barry Boehm on Parametric Models, all the paper presentations from the industry and academia representatives and the vivid discussions that would always follow up.

On May 21st I attended the Doctoral Symposium. I got a special invitation for participation given that I was the only master student present. I was happy I could follow some of the PhD students’ work given the broad diversity and maturity of the topics. I was very interested to attend the Doctoral Symposium given that I complete my master studies in the next few months and I did not have quite a clear view of whether I should go for a PhD or for a job in Industry. I definitely believe it was of great importance to me to get a real insight of those students’ lives as PhD students. They got valuable advice on the improvement of current and future work, and I would always think how I would face those issues if I was a PhD student too.

Then from May 22nd- May 24th I attended the main conference. Perfect organization, inspirational papers, lots of networking, these are some of the characteristics I would highlight. I was quite captured from all the keynotes given in the three consecutive days of the main conference. Keynotes are one of my favorite parts because I really hear experience talking, and that is elaborated. I did also participate in the “Student- Industry” lunch where representatives of Industry joined different tables in a rota. I interacted and asked few questions to get feedback. It was interesting to talk to people from Google, IBM and Microsoft and to know better the most wanted core values in the recruiting process.

One very important detail that made my conference participation the most beneficial was the assignment of a conference mentor from SIGSOFT. I am glad and honored to have met Prof. Laurie Williams. She was a great woman that did communicate a lot to me, not only through her direct messages but also through her attitude. Laurie introduced me to many people and made my networking much easier. She did also advise me on my future career possibilities and answered to many concerns of mine.

Not of minor importance was the fact that ICSE 2013 was held in a top destination such as San Francisco. I could explore the city in the first two days of my arrival and then in the last day of the main conference we had a banquet cruise to the Golden Gate.

I would like to end by saying all my expectations were met to the absolute fullest extent and I can say with confidence that I carried back home many lessons learned and great memories. Thank you ACM-W for enabling this!

Artiona Bogo

Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Fraunhofer IESE
Technical University of Kaiserslautern