On Nov. 1-2, Moscow hosted the 8th Central & Eastern European Software Engineering Conference in Russia (CEE-SECR 2012), an independent international software development conference. The program included more than a hundred papers and panel discussions over two days, with master-classes taking place prior to the conference on Oct. 31.

The event was again held at Digital October, Moscow’s center for new technologies. More than 700 participants from 15 countries took part in the event including: programmers, QA engineers, architects, analysts, scientists, and managers at all levels. Some reports given at the conference were so popular that they were filled beyond capacity.

Much of the conference was made available live online, significantly expanding the audience for SECR. During the conference the site received over 5000 visitors.

This year’s conference was the most intense in the history of SECR, having the same number of reports as past years crammed into the reduced conference length of two days. Reports were given simultaneously in four rooms and via an on-site Open Space, which allowed attendees to choose between five presentations at any given time.

According to participants, the most interesting were:

• Will the Programming Profession Survive? – a discussion moderated by Vyacheslav Nesterov (EMC) and Nick Puntikov (First Line Software)
• Common Mistakes by Startups – a report by Sergey Belousov, Runa Capital
• Teaching Code in an Online World – a report by Benjamin B. Bederson, University of Maryland
• How to Finance Your Business Without Selling Your Soul – a report by Dmitry Dubograev, Femida.us
• Modeling and Cloud Computing – a report by Richard Soule, OMG

At the closing ceremony the Bertrand Meyer prize was awarded for the best research report. The winners were Vitaly Trifanov and Dmitry Tsitelov of DevExperts for their work on Dynamic Data Race Detection in Concurrent Java Programs. The award was established by Bertrand Meyer who is the creator of the Eiffel language, member of the SECE Program Committee and head of chairs at ETH and ITMO.

This year’s conference received support from Russian Venture Company, Epam Systems, Intel, T-Systems, Microsoft, Luxoft, Deutsche Bank, First Line Software, EMC, Oracle, Jet Brains, Parallels, Microfocus, and Infostroy. RUSSOFT, which for the second year in a row held its annual meeting during the event, actively supported the conference alongside APKIT, Agile Russia, RASPO, RAEC, ISDEF, OMG, the Cloud Standards Customer Council, and many others.