The 7th International Conference on Product Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2006) brought together researchers and industrial practitioners for reporting new research results and exchanging experiences and findings in the area of process and product improvement. The focus of the conference was on understanding, evaluating, controlling, and improving the relationship between process improvement activities (such as the deployment of innovative defect detection processes) and their effects on products (such as improved product reliability and safety). Consequently, major topics of the conference included the evaluation of existing software process improvement (SPI) approaches in different contexts, the presentation of new or modified SPI approaches, and the relation between SPI and new development techniques or emerging application domains. The need for SPI is being widely recognized. Current trends in software intensive systems such as increased distribution of software development and growing dependability on software-intensive systems in everyday life emphasize this need. This implies the establishment of advanced process improvement capabilities and an adequate understanding of the impact of the processes on the generated products, services, and business value in different situations. Recent trends enforce the establishment of such capabilities: more and more products are being developed in distributed, global environments with many customer-supplier relations in the development chain. Outsourcing, off-shoring, near-shoring, and in-sourcing aggravate this trend. In addition, systems are being built from multiple disciplines (such as electronics, mechanics, and software). Supporting such distributed and multi-disciplinary development requires well-understood and accurately implemented development process interfaces, process synchronization, and process evolution.
