This year's COSET (CoSET2000, The Second International Symposium on Constructing Software Engineering Tools) event took place on Monday.

Automated tools play an important role in the promotion and adoption of software engineering methods and processes, both within a particular organisation and within the software engineering community generally. The development of these tools is in itself a significant software engineering task, requiring a considerable investment of time and resources. There are a large number of different kinds of automated software engineering tool variously known as Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE), Computer Aided Method Engineering (CAME), Integrated Project Support Environments (IPSE), Software Engineering Environments (SEE), and meta-CASE tools.

Although these tools differ in the particular methods, activities and phases of the software development cycle to which they are applied, constructors of these tools often face similar implementation issues. Decisions about host platform, implementation language, conformance with standards and reference models, choice of repository, integration and interoperability mechanisms and user interface style have to be made. The different strategies adopted by tool constructors when solving these tool development problems is the theme of this symposium.

This year COSET attracted 34 submissions, of which 16 were accepted. Twenty six delegates met to hear papers focused on practical software engineering issues encountered by tool developers in three sessions: "Re-engineering, maintenance and code management," "Integration, interoperability and data interchange," and "Modelling, transformations and generation techniques". A plenary panel session discussed issues such as how researchers and practitioners could work together to move the field forward by "standing on each others’ shoulders, not on each other toes." Traditional answers, such as use of standards, were discussed but, significantly, it was noted that there is no one Internet-based forum for the discussion of such matters.

The establishment of such a forum (the COSET mailing list at www.mailbase.ac.uk) to facilitate more regular communication and cooperation will be one of the positive outcomes of this year’s symposium.