Development Environments: Nominate from the new breed programming languages, source code editors and integrated development environments (IDEs).

Collaboration Solution: Nominate from groupware, real-time conferencing and collaboration, and digital communities.

Content Management: Nominate from content creation, categorization, workflow, publishing and delivery tools.

Design and Modeling: Requirements gathering, modeling, prototyping, GUI design, analysis tools, including automatically generating code from models.

Change and Configuration Management: Nominate from across tools that track and manage software defects and enhancement requests as well as version control and change or configuration management.

Testing: The best solution developed to test the functionality of a software product or service or a segment of code. Nominate from across test scripting, automation, static and defect tracking, bug tracking and documentation, functional and load testing, quality assurance planning, test-case design, white- and black-box testing and source code analysis.

Security: Nominate tools from across authentication and encryption, code analysis, firewalls, network monitoring, system enhancements, system monitoring and spam prevention.

Web Development: Nominate from web development and deployment tools that are helping developers and designers push the boundaries of the web.

Mobile Development: Awards the best software application, software service or infrastructure solution that enables access to software functionality and boosts the productivity and adaptability of a mobile device including small form factor devices and/or phones. Includes operating systems, infrastructure and network solutions.

Frameworks: Nominate from across the several libraries, components, and frameworks that are part of every developers treasure chest.

Database: Awards the best software solution for the storage, organization, management, search, editing, reporting, analysis, and retrieval of large quantities of data.