SOFTVIS

Welcome to SOFTVIS 2008, the 4th ACM Symposium on Software Visualization. This symposium focuses specifically on visualization techniques that draw on aspects of software maintenance, program comprehension, reverse engineering, and reengineering. The high-level research question is "How visualization can help programmers understand and analyze largescale software systems?"

We are very pleased to be part of the "Visual Week" held from September 15th to 19th 2008 in Herrsching am Ammersee, Germany. This event combines three conferences (IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Diagrams, and SOFTVIS), together with two workshops (Layout of Engineering Diagrams and Sketch Tools for Diagramming). "Visual Week" promises to be a veritable feast for the connoisseur of visual computing application, with a program that highlights the multiple uses of visual and interactive techniques in different areas of computing, including software engineering.

This year's edition of SOFTVIS continues the tradition of co-location with the VL/HCC conference started at the previous edition in 2006. We have a joint technical paper session where representative papers from both events will be presented. Also, we share a joint keynote address delivered by John Stasko, and joint coffee breaks with the main conference of the Visual Week and a poster session and reception with the Graduate Consortium event. As with the previous edition, discounts for joint registrations were figured out by all the General Chairs of the Visual Week events. Mark Minas, the General Chair of VL/HCC, kindly helped us with managing the joint registration and logistics for all the involved events.

This year's edition of SOFTVIS is marked by a number of innovations. First, we introduced the short paper category. Papers accepted in the short category were those that the program committee felt contained important contributions for the symposium, but that would require further technical work or maturity to warrant a full paper publication. Short papers were given 4 pages in the proceedings, as opposed to 10 pages for full papers. Second, for the first time in the history of SOFTVIS, we have full-color proceedings, which does proper justice to the highly visual content of the accepted papers.

This year there were 38 technical papers submitted. Each submission was reviewed by at least three members of the international program committee. On the basis of these reviews, the program committee accepted 16 full papers (42 percent acceptance rate) and 8 short papers for inclusion in the technical program and publication in the proceedings. Additionally, we continued the poster track established in previous editions of SOFTVIS. In all 9 poster papers were accepted for publication in the proceedings; these were presented in a special poster session held as part of the opening reception.