Current faculty members in the Institute for Software Research are authors of four of the 35 articles chosen by the editors of IEEE Software as the best peer-reviewed articles published during the magazine's first 25 years. Another four articles have authors with Carnegie Mellon ties.

Mary Shaw, the Alan J. Perlis professor of computer science, is one of just four authors to have two articles in the Top 35 list.

"Our 25th anniversary Top Picks list hopefully contains something for every taste and orientation," the editors write in the January/February issue. "Whether or not you agree with these articles' ultimate messages, you'll find them packed with wisdom and timeless ideas." See the complete list.


The 35 top articles were gleaned from more than 1,200 peer-reviewed, full-length articles. Initially, editorial board members and former editors nominated 37 of their favorite articles. Those were combined with 13 papers that had been heavily downloaded or cited into a shortlist of 50 to be evaluated by a 22-member selection committee. The committee rated the articles based on historical importance, appeal to Software readers, information value, applicability, popularity and relevance.


The picks include:

•"Prospects for an Engineering Discipline of Software," a 1990 article by Shaw; •"Architectural Mismatch: Why Reuse is So Hard," a 1995 paper by David Garlan, professor of computer science, Robert Allen, then a graduate student, and John Ockerbloom, then a post-doc;
•"Extreme Programming from a CMM Perspective," a 2001 article by Mark C. Paulk, senior systems scientist, who was then at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute.
•"The Golden Age of Software Architecture," a 2006 paper by Shaw and Paul Clements, senior member of the technical staff at SEI.
Other authors of Top 35 picks with Carnegie Mellon ties include Watts S. Humphrey, an SEI Fellow; Greg Morrisett of Harvard University, who received his PhD in 1995; Chris F. Kemerer of the University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business and an adjunct lecturer in computer science; and Robert DeLine of Microsoft, who received his PhD in computer science in 1999.