Software Engineering in ICS – A 50-year History

Inspired by the ICS 50th anniversary, Prof. Emeritus Richard Taylor documented the history of Software Engineering in ICS at UCI. Taylor reached out to faculty members and graduate students from across the past five decades, gathering information – as well as fun anecdotes and fond recollections. The resulting document captures the key events, topics, technical impacts, achievements, activities, and people who have contributed to software engineering’s rich legacy from ICS at UCI.

A hallmark of SE research at UCI has been its interdisciplinary character; many of the key results were the consequence of looking at key software challenges in applied circumstances, such as the Internet, or as the result of working with researchers in other fields, such as HCI.

Software for the Internet has a long and strong history in ICS - from the creation of DNS through to the HTTP/1.1 protocol, REST architectural style, and Apache web server. Major SE topics at Irvine have included software reuse, programming environments, integrated software engineering environments, process, software safety, analysis and testing, security, design methods and tools, open source software, and software architecture. SE topics have been pursued by two dozen faculty over the 50 years of ICS and have been the topic of over 100 Ph.D. dissertations.

Our diverse pursuits were enabled by strong grant support from government agencies and many corporate friends and sponsors, and institutional support from ISR and its predecessor, the Irvine Research Unit in Software (IRUS). Community events became a hallmark, ranging from one of the first software process improvement networks (SPIN), to topical workshops, to leadership and hosting of major international software engineering conferences. New companies have sprung from UCI SE work, and a legion of developers and researchers have graduated.

Read all about it in the ISR Technical Report “History of Software Engineering in ICS at UCI.”