The Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) has awarded a Retrospective Impact Paper Award to Carnegie Mellon's David Garlan and former PhD students Robert Allen and John Ockerbloom. They were cited for a 1995 research paper on reuse of software components in which they coined the phrase "architectural mismatch."

Practitioners at the time often were frustrated by lack of interoperability when they tried to combine existing pieces of software into new systems. These problems went beyond simple mismatches of programming languages or database schemas. In their paper, "Architectural Mismatch, or Why it's hard to build systems out of existing parts," Garlan and his students identified a different class of problem, which involved the assumptions that a reusable part makes about the structure of the application in which it is supposed to operate. The paper underscored the importance of software architecture and opened up new avenues of fundamental research.

Garlan is professor of computer science and director of professional software engineering programs. Allen now works for IBM and Ockerbloom is at the University of Pennsylvania.

The retrospective paper award is presented each year to recognize influential software engineering research that was published prior to 1998. The award was announced at the joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering Sept. 5-9 in Szeged, Hungary.