Message from the Chairs

Program comprehension is a vital software engineering activity, necessary when one enhances, reuses, inspects, reengineers, migrates, or maintains software systems. The International Conference on Program Comprehension is one of the leading conferences in the area of program understanding, software analysis, reverse engineering, software evolution, and software visualization. Over the years, the ICPC conference has provided a lively forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government, to present and discuss both the state-of-the-art and the state-of-thepractice in the general area of program comprehension. For the 15th year in the life of this event, we have arranged a very exciting four-day program. We received 66 submissions and based on over 200 review reports from 45 Program Committee members and another 50 external reviewers, we have selected 22 full-length and 4 short papers for presentation at the conference. In addition to the technical-paper sessions, we also have a tool demonstration session, held jointly with the VISSOFT workshop, which is collocated with ICPC this year. Furthermore, this year´s program includes three working sessions. The first reflects on the evolution of our field and community through the past 15 years, and where we are headed next; the second examines the role that empirical methods play in evaluating our techniques; and, the third session examines the challenges that aspect orientation introduces to our research. Last, but certainly not least, we are particularly thrilled to feature two stimulating keynote addresses from Gregor Kiczales, of the University of British Columbia, and Mark Harman, of King´s College London. Over the years, Kiczales´ work on aspect-oriented design and programming and Harman???s work on slicing and search-based software engineering methods have been very influential in shaping the systems we develop and the analyses we conduct on them.