State of the Journal

OVER the past four years the editorial board of TSE has worked to identify and address challenges and opportunities in the publication of research contributions in the field of software engineering. As we have reported in prior editorials, TSE has made consistent and substantial progress in reducing the time to review submitted manuscripts and has helped to create the successful, and growing, “journal first” publication model in software engineering. These efforts have been the product of thousands of hours of volunteer effort on the part of the dedicated editorial board and reviewer community who support TSE. Space does not allow for thanking each of them in person, but we would like to express our thanks to John Grundy and Jane Cleland-Huang who served as Associate Editor-in-Chiefs for TSE over the past four years. They have been invaluable contributors in advancing TSE. In all of our work, we have maintained the perspective that TSE serves the software engineering community. We have worked with partners at other journals, in the professional organizations, and in conference organizing committees to develop approaches that work well for the large, and complex, software engineering publication ecosystem. The steps we have made put the community in a position to move forward to create a more diverse and inclusive system for disseminating world-class research results and we hope that the entire community will work to advance our collective interests with a similar sense of service. Next up as TSE Editor-in-Chief is Professor NenadMedvidovi c. Neno’s record as a tireless contributor to the community over the past decade serving as Program co-Chair of ICSE, Steering Committee Chair of ICSE, Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT), and on the editorial boards of TSE and ACM TOSEM demonstrates his deep commitment to serving the software engineering community. His experience working with the two most prominent professional organizations that sponsor conferences and journals in software engineering puts him in a unique position to address changes to publication processes and practices that our field is experiencing. Professor Medvidovi c is a world-class scholar and has been a pioneer in advancing research on architecture-based solutions to software development challenges. His experience as an accomplished and widely published author will inform his leadership of TSE and drive it to be an increasingly valuable resource for the software engineering community.