Dear ICSE 2000 PC Members, This message provides important information to help you prepare your reviews. Please read it carefully before you begin your reviews and contact us with any questions. ===== Action items from this message: 1. Download and print your assigned papers now. 2. Double check for any conflicts concerning assigned papers now. 3. Submit your reviews incrementally, completing them by October 23. 4. Make arrangements for the PC meeting. ===== Details 1. Download and print your assigned papers now. The review period has now begun. The number of research papers submitted to ICSE has again increased this year. The good news is that there are no speculative papers to review this year. Thus, your workload is about the same as last year. This year, we received 278 submissions: 243 research papers 24 case-study papers 11 education papers We declined 10 papers that authors submitted well after the deadline but before we disabled the system. We assigned three reviewers per non-PC paper and four reviewers per PC paper. We tried to assign you to papers in which you expressed interest, but we were not able to do this in all cases. We hope you understand that even though you may have gotten a paper in which you have little or no interest, it is critical that you make your best effort at performing a thorough review. Please remember that the conference is judged as much by the quality of the reviews it returns to authors as by the papers that are finally accepted. Most people were assigned on the order of 20 papers to review. However, the distribution is not even, owing to the fact that the distribution of submissions among topic areas was not even. 2. Double check for any conflicts concerning assigned papers now. We noticed that some people may have missed some conflicts of interest when reviewing the submission documentation. Please double check now that you have no conflicts concerning your assigned papers. If you find any conflicts, notify us immediately. We need this information for two important reasons: so we can reassign the paper to another reviewer; so we can prepare materials for the PC meeting. Nearly all the papers were submitted electronically in PDF. Wilhelm and his group have been able to print all papers, except paper 66 (which we are still working on), in Paderborn. However, you may not be able to download or print some of the papers at your location. Thus, it is extremely important that you visit the review web site as soon as possible and download your assigned papers. We want to resolve any problems now instead of at the last minute. If you do encounter problems, please send a detailed description of the problem to Sammy Maniera at the following email address: sammy@upd.de Sammy will work with you to find a fix as quickly as possible. 3. Submit your reviews incrementally, completing them by October 23. There are a some of you who are new to the ICSE PC who might want some guidance in the review process. First, please respect the confidentiality of the papers that you review. In particular, you may not redistribute the papers or disclose what papers have been submitted. Some papers are even subjects of patent applications, so we must preserve their confidentiality until general publication. Second, you are expected to personally read and write reviews for every paper for which you have been assigned. You may solicit additional readers (not substitute reviewers), but they must respect the confidentiality of the submissions and reviews, and they must not have a conflict of interest. If you seek an additional reader, please enter their name, title, affiliation, and relationship to you (e.g., student, colleague, etc.) in the appropriate place on the review form. Third, one of the items you need to mark for each review is your level of expertise for the paper. Reviewers are often hesitant to classify themselves as "experts"; this misclassification may affect the overall review of the paper. Please use the guideline that if you know the area well enough to assess the novelty and contribution of the paper, know the related work, and have sufficient background to understand the work presented, you should classify yourself as an expert. You must submit your reviews through the web form on the Witan Web review site. All reviews are due Monday, October 23. We will need the time before the PC meeting to read, process, and organize almost 800 reviews, and prepare for the meeting. We cannot emphasize enough the importance of getting your reviews in on time. 4. Make arrangements for the PC meeting. If you have not already done so, please make your hotel reservations as soon as possible. Information is available on the FSE web site at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/fse8/. You will get the same hotel rate as FSE attendees if you register by the deadline. We hope you will be attending FSE before the PC meeting --- the conference has an excellent program this year. Thank you for your time and effort. We know what a burden it is for busy people to produce quality reviews for so many papers in such a short period of time. We look forward to seeing you in San Diego. Happy Reviewing and see you in San Diego! Mary Jean and Wilhelm