State of the Journal Editorial

THE past 12 months have been an eye opening experience for me as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE). I have come to understand the enormous professional and community effort involved in the publication of the top journal in the field of software engineering research. Contributions come in many forms and from many people. Many hundreds of authors have submitted their best work to TSE and hundreds of experts in the field have made time to conduct thorough scholarly review of that work. The dedicated cadre of 40-plus members of the editorial board have orchestrated and brought their expert judgment to bear in the review process. Finally, members of the IEEE professional staff have supported authors, reviewers, and editors in their efforts. I want to personally thank everyone involved in TSE for making the journal the success that it is. Two groups of contributors deserve special mention: reviewers and associate editors. In this issue, you will see a list of individuals who volunteered their time to review manuscripts for TSE. A large number of TSE manuscripts have a full review process commissioned on their behalf. This means that a manuscript is assigned to three experts in the field for review. The efforts of reviewers are voluntary and they contribute their time to help maintain the standards of the field and of TSE and to provide constructive feedback to other researchers to advance the field. As an author, when you submit a manuscript to TSE I hope that you are cognizant of the debt that you owe the software engineering research community—if you are the sole author then you owe three reviews. If you are asked to review a TSE manuscript please keep that debt in mind. Many of the individuals who reviewed for TSE in 2014 did not submit a paper this past year and they should consider their service a debt paid forward. Associate editors of TSE play a critical role. They assess manuscripts to make judgments about their appropriateness for the journal. When appropriate they commission a set of reviews from experts in the field. Perhaps most critically, when reviews are returned they interpret and synthesize the set of reviews to provide a coherent message and judgment to the authors about their paper. I was fortunate to inherit an editorial board from my predecessor that was filled with thoughtful, dedicated experts who want to see the software engineering community’s research advance and excel. Seven members of the editorial board retired in 2014: Marta Kwiatkowska, Bev Littlewood, Dag Sjøberg, Jane Cleland-Huang, Frank Tip, Murray Woodside, and Betty Cheng. I thank each of them for their service which, in some cases, is continuing as they shepherd papers through the review process. Replacing the expertise lost this year was one of my greatest challenges. I have been fortunate to have this group of renown scholars accept invitations to join the TSE editorial board in 2014: Myra Cohen, Abhik Roychoudhury, Natalia Juristo, Eric Tanter, Massimiliano Di Penta, Tevfik Bultan, Sam Malek, Adrian Marcus, Mira Mezini, Corina Pasareanu, Thomas Zimmerman, Andrea Zisman, Phil McMinn, and Alessandro Garcia. This is a diverse group spanning eight countries, four continents, academia and industry, and providing broad coverage of software engineering topics with deep expertise. The TSE editorial board has been enhanced by the addition of John Grundy as Associate Editor-in-Chief. John joined me back in January of 2014 to assess and refine the process by which manuscripts are handled at TSE.