Guest editors' introduction to the 3rd issue of Experimental Software and Toolkits (EST): A special issue on Academic Software Development Tools and Techniques (WASDeTT 2008)

Introduction. This is already the third special issue on Experimental Software and Toolkits (EST) of Elsevier's Science of Computer Programming. As such it has truly become a forum where academic software engineers can share their systems with fellow researchers, so that others can build on their research and tools, and reproduce similar or conduct other experiments. EST not only offers a means to authors to publish their systems and get the academic credits, it also offers a way of archiving the developed systems for the future. This is an improvement over conference and workshop tool demonstrations, where the system can be seen in action but typically not downloaded, tested or used by others. It differs from publishing the system in the open source community, because independent referees from the academic community has performed a quality review on the published systems and papers.