Harlan D. Mills Award

Established in memory of Harlan D. Mills to recognize researchers and practitioners who have demonstrated long-standing, sustained, and impactful contributions to software engineering practice and research through the development and application of sound theory.

Nomination Deadline:

1 October 2025 - 11:59PM EDT

The award nomination requires a minimum of 3 endorsements by the award deadline.

This technical award was first given in 1999. The award consists of a US$3,000 honorarium, museum-quality memento, and a possible invited talk during the week of the annual International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), co-sponsored by IEEE Computer Society Technical Community on Software Engineering (TCSE).

Achievements that have previously been recognized by an award may not be re-nominated. All other nominations may be resubmitted in any subsequent year. Any submission that has previously been declined must address the deficiencies outlined by the Chair of the Award Committee.

2025 Harlan D. Mills Award Subcommittee Chair

Massimiliano Di Penta, Univerity of Sannio, Benevento

About Harlan Mills

Past Recipients

2025 Bashar Nuseibeh: For outstanding research on requirements engineering of evolving critical systems, to improve both software development practices and user experiences.
2024 Premkumar Devanbu: For impactful contributions to the statistical modelling of source code and development practices, to improve software tools and processes.
2023 David Harel: For the development of visual formalisms and for the invention of Statecharts, which had a profound impact on software engineering.
2022 Matthew B. Dwyer: For contributions to the specification and analysis of software.
2021 Dieter Rombach: For contributions and leadership in research, teaching, and technology transfer in the area of empirical software engineering.
2020 Nachiappan Nagappan: For outstanding contributions to empirical software engineering and data-driven software development.
2019 Mark Harman: For fundamental contributions throughout software engineering, including seminal contributions in establishing search-based software engineering, reigniting research in slicing and testing, and founding genetic improvement.
2018 Gail Murphy: For outstanding research on understanding software-development practices and tools that improve the productivity of developers.
2017 Pamela Zave: For groundbreaking use of formal methods in the development of telecommunication software and for enduring contributions to software engineering theory.
2016 Wolfram Schulte: For research and research leadership contributions leading to major theoretical and practical advances in software verification.
2015 Gerard Holzmann: For fundamental contributions to improving software quality, in particular through model checking tools and coding standards, and for successfully transferring these contributions to practitioners developing mission-critical software.
2014 Patrick Cousot: For the invention of "abstract interpretation", development of tool support, and its practical application.
2014 Radhia Cousot: For the invention of "abstract interpretation", development of tool support, and its practical application.
2012 Lionel Claude Briand: For practical and fundamental contributions to Model-based Software Testing and Verification.
2011 John Rushby: For practical and fundamental contributions to Software & Hardware Reliability with seminal contributions to computer security, fault tolerance, and formal methods.
2009 Bertrand Meyer: For practical and fundamental contributions to object-oriented software engineering, software reuse, and the integration of formal methods into the above.
2007 Bev Littlewood: For leading research on the application of rigorous probabilistic and statistical techniques to problems of assessment in software engineering, particularly in systems dependability.
2006 John C. Knight: For encouraging software researchers to focus on practical results as well as theory, and for critically analyzing their assumptions and evaluating their research claims.
2004 Elaine Weyuker: For leading research on rigorous software testing including industrial evaluations of the comparative effectiveness and costs of such testing methods.
2003 Victor R. Basili: For significant contributions to programming languages, program reading and writing, and empirical methods.
2002 Jesse H. Poore: For significant contributions to function-based software development and statistical software testing.
2001 Meir (Manny) Lehman: For pioneering contributions to the empirical study of software processes and program evolution.
2000 Barry Boehm: For development of empirical software engineering models of cost, schedule, and quality.
1999 David Parnas: For fundamental contributions to large-scale systems development by establishing software engineering as an engineering discipline.