Message from the General and Program Co-Chairs

This year marks an important event, the change of the title of the venue from its former title "IEEE International Workshop on Program Comprehension" (IWPC) to its current new title. This change better reflects the caliber and the scope of the venue as it has evolved during the past thirteen years since its first offering in 1992, in Orlando, Florida. As the General and Program Chairs of this year???s venue, we would like to extend our sincere thanks to the Steering Committee members, and to the members of the IEEE Technical Committee on Software Engineering who proposed and approved, respectively, this title change. The new venue will certainly follow the steps of high quality and excellence set by the IWPC community over the years. Program comprehension is a vital software engineering and maintenance activity. It is necessary to facilitate reverse engineering, inspection, reuse, maintenance, and evolution of software systems. More recently, with the use of iterative and incremental process models for software development, and the concept of Round-Trip software engineering, program comprehension, modeling, and evolution are now taking new meanings, where techniques and models primarily used for the comprehension of existing legacy systems can be also considered to support the forward engineering process. In this respect, ICPC aims to provide a top quality forum where these new challenges can be addressed and where researchers and industry practitioners can present, discuss, and debate stateof- the-art and state-of-the-practice approaches, theories, techniques, and tools. The ICPC 2006 venue boasts an excellent program that consists of two keynote talks, twentythree technical paper presentations distributed in eight single track sessions, seven short technical paper presentations structured around a special short papers session, eight research tool demonstrations presented in a special tools session, and three half-day parallel working sessions. To ensure a high-qu- lity venue, all papers have been reviewed by at least three expert reviewers who anonymously provided comments to the authors. We hope that you enjoy the program, and that you will find it useful for planning and conducting your future research or industrial projects.