FASE has assumed its current name and format in 1998, when the ETAPS conferences have been created.
The first FASE was held in Lisbon, chaired by professor Egidio Astesiano at ETAPS 1998. However, FASE is older than ETAPS. The acronym FASE was first used in 1993 but with a different meaning than today. FASE builds on the traditions of Colloquim on Software Engineering (CSE), of the Advanced Seminar on Foundations of Innovative Software Development, and the Colloquium on Formal Approaches of Software Engineering (FASE!) organized as part of the TAPSOFT brand until 1997. The European Association of Software Science and Technology (EASST) was the driving force behind creating and developing FASE.
FASE has a broad scope of interest.
As the field of the Software Engineering is broad, the scope of FASE is broad as well, including requirements, design, architecture, modeling, refactoring, software transformation, generation and synthesis, test, verification, validation, development methods and processes (agile), and so on. Thanks to its origins FASE has been traditionally focused primarily on formal models and methods, often involving reasoning about code, design, and the associated processes. However, these are not the only topics of interest. Agile methods, object-orientation, search-based software engineering have been discussed in the past. Crucially, the letter “F” in FASE stands for “fundamental” not formal, and all research asking basic foundational questions about developing software is welcomed.
FASE is strongly affected by new developments in the technical landscape: AI and machine learning, security, block chain, quantum computing. FASE will continue to shift its interest along with the needs of the society and the interests of the research community. Wherever we go, we will continue asking what are the principles of developing systems in these areas, and what techniques help to reason about them, supporting new engineering methods and tools.
In 2022, FASE celebrated its 25 anniversary. Watch the talk of Gabriele Taentzer and Eduard Kamburjan about the conference history!