How healthy are software engineering conferences?

In this article we study the health of software engineering conferences by means of a suite of metrics created for this purpose. The metrics measure stability of the community, openness to new authors, introversion, representativeness of the PC with respect to the authors' community, availability of PC candidates, and scientific prestige. Using this metrics suite, we assess the health of 11 software engineering conferences over a period of more than 10 years. In general, our findings suggest that software engineering conferences are healthy, but we observe important differences between conferences with a wide scope and those with a more narrow scope. We also find that depending on the chosen health metric, some conferences perform better than others. This knowledge may be used by prospective authors to decide in which conferences to publish, and by conference steering committees or PC chairs to assess their selection process.