Software Innovation New Zealand held its 8th AGM last week on the 27th of November. The purpose of AGM is to reflect on the activities of SI^NZ throughout the year, find opportunities for improvement and plan the next steps forward. While the SI^NZ officers remained mostly the same, Dr. Jessica Turner was elected as a new Executive Member. Welcome Jessica!
Key accomplishments of SI^NZ in 2024 (Summarized by Assoc. Prof. Kelly Blincoe)
- The Aotearoa New Zealand Software Engineering Research Strategy was released and is available here. Many thanks to Sherlock Licorish and Matthias Galster for leading this effort, to Panos Patros, Ewan Tempero, Tony Savarimuthu, Tony Clear, Judy Bowen, and Craig Anslow for their contributions, and to Jens Dietrich and Kelly Blincoe for reviewing the drafts.
- A successful workshop was held at the University of Waikato in Tauranga, including engaging talks, networking, a doctoral symposium, and a fantastic tour of the campus. Many thanks to the organisers, Jessica Turner, Judy Bowen, and Jemma König, Dhanushka Jayasuriya, and Zane Hamilton.
- We hosted organised the Australasian Software Engineering Summer School (ASESS) in January 2024, co-located with the Australasian Computer Science Week. See https://sites.google.com/view/asess2024/home. It was a large and successful event, with international participation. Thank you to Craig Anslow and Fabian Gilson who organised along with John Grundy, Christoph Treude, and Omar Haggag.
- Our members had funding success. Congratulations to Sherlock Licorish and Steve MacDonell for securing a one-million-dollar research grant from the MBIE Endeavour Fund, together with collaborator Markus Wagner, from Monash University.
- Our members were awarded three Most Influential Paper Awards.
- Ewan Tempero, Craig Anslow, Jens Dietrich, and James Noble for their APSEC 2010 paper titled “The Qualitas Corpus: A Curated Collection of Java Code for Empirical Studies” with co-authors Ted Han, Jing Li, Markus Lumpe, and Hayden Melton.
- Kelly Blincoe for her MSR 2014 paper titled “The Promises and Perils of Mining GitHub” with co-authors Eirini Kalliamvakou, Georgios Gousios, Leif Singer, Daniel M German, and Daniela Damian.
- James Noble for his Most Notable Paper Award for their Onward! 2012 awarded at Onward!2024 for the paper titled “Grace: the Absence of (Inessential) Difficulty” https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2384592.2384601 with co-authors Andrew P. Black, Kim B. Bruce, Michael Homer
- Our marketing team restarted the seminar series and started a SI^NZ newsletter. Thanks to Daniel Alencar da Costa and the marketing team.
- The SI^NZ history has been documented on the website, you can find it here, thanks to Fabian Gilson!
- We introduced a student membership option. Thanks to Valerio Terragni.
- We introduced a SI^NZ code of conduct, which can be viewed here.
Looking forward, planning is underway for ICSME 2025, which will be held in Auckland during the week of 8 September. This is being led by General Chairs Amjed Tahir and Steve MacDonell. It is a great opportunity to showcase SI^NZ research at an international venue without needing to travel overseas. We encourage NZ SE researchers and industry practitioners to support this effort by submitting papers and attending. More details at https://conf.researchr.org/home/icsme-2025.
We also hope to hold another SI^NZ in person event in 2025. Please contact Kelly Blincoe at k.blincoe@auckland.ac.nz if you are interested in hosting or helping with organisation.
Finally, thanks to the 2024 SI^NZ Executive Committee for all of their work: Kelly Blincoe, Sherlock Licorish, Valerio Terragni, Daniel Alencar da Costa, Jens Dietrich, Fabian Gilson, Craig Anslow, Steve MacDonell, James Noble, and Tony Savarimuthu.
Thanks to all of the SI^NZ members for another successful year.