MINNEAPOLIS – May is England month. First, Tony Blair announced his resignation. Next, Queen Elizabeth – ostensibly to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of her colony’s oldest settlement in Jamestown, Va. – came to call.

Now, the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) is set to hit downtown Minneapolis primarily from May 23 to 25. It’s a coalition of the technologically willing. While ICSE is not based in England, its current steering committee chair, David Rosenblum, is based at University College London (UCL).

I had never heard of ICSE until recently. It turns out that “ICSE” is a registered trademark of the Association of Computing Machinery and the Institute for Electrical & Electronics Engineers. This means there are about to be three days of the most advanced thinking imaginable offered up by the world’s premiere software technologists.

That, at least, is the promise and the premise. One can look at the conference schedule and see that its sessions are not for the faint of mind. For example, a session on “software evolution” is slated for May 24 at 11 a.m.

Too obvious. Perhaps something a bit headier? Let’s try “pedagogy,” which is an educational paper session scheduled for May 23 at 2:30 p.m. It’s a constructivist approach to teaching software processes.

That one lost me. Let’s try two more. There are concurrent sessions running at 2 p.m. on May 25 on testing and then on reuse. It’s obvious that ICSE is not for everyone. So who is it for?

According to conference chair John Knight, a native Brit whose day job is as a professor of computer science at the University of Virginia, ICSE is for “managers, practicing engineers, researchers and educators in all areas of software engineering. They gather to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, results, experiences and concerns in the field of software engineering.”

While these ICSE folks appear much like Dr. Who’s legion of intergalactic time-travel masters located nowhere and “everywhen” at once, an extraordinary amount of volunteer talent from around the world has gone into the committees that formulate the content of this annual conference.

Conference sites read more like a roster of international Olympics competitions than a confab of technical gurus. ICSE in 2006 was in Shanghai, and in prior years, it went to St. Louis, Orlando, Toronto, Los Angeles, Kyoto, Boston, Berlin, Seattle and Limerick, Ireland.

Domestically, there are scientists and academicians from the universities of Massachusetts, Nebraska, California, Minnesota, Iowa State and Rutgers. Canadian universities include Ottowa, Calgary, Toronto and Victoria. There are European participants from universities in England, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.

Corporate committee chairs include management from companies such as Microsoft and Lockheed Martin.

“Software affects every person’s daily life in multiple, varied ways,” Knight said. “Many of the services upon which we depend – including telecommunications, energy supply, transportation, banking and even entertainment – depend critically on large computer systems.

He added: “Those computer systems would not function without vast amounts of software. The development and maintenance of computer software is a major industry worldwide that employs engineers with many different titles. In practice, most are actually software engineers.”

The main ICSE conference includes many sessions on research, education, demonstrations and experience. It also includes a set of presentations on the future of software engineering, panels on the impact software engineering research has had on software engineering practices and three keynote presentations on crucial topics by leaders in the field.

Among these is keynoter Steve Fisher. He is the senior vice president of application exchange at Salesforce.com. Alongside the main conference, the ICSE program includes a wide range of tutorials and workshops. Tutorials provide opportunities to learn about specific technical areas and workshops are forums for the discussion of cutting-edge areas.