Matias Vierimaa – författare

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.

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.

On behalf of the PROFES Organizing Committee we are proud to present the proce- th ings of the 11 International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2010), held in Limerick, Ireland. Since the first conference in 1999 the conference has established its place in the software engineering community as a respected conference that brings together participants from academia and industry. The roots of PROFES are in professional software process improvement motivated by product and service quality needs. The conference addresses both the solutions found in practice as well as relevant research results from academia. To ensure that PROFES retains its high quality and focus on the most relevant research issues, the conference has actively maintained close collaboration with industry and subsequently widened its scope to the research areas of collaborative and agile software devel- ment. The main themes of this year’s conference were “Agile and Lean Processes” and “Engineering Service-Oriented Systems. ” These two main themes enabled us to cover the contemporary software devel- ment demands and trends in a comprehensive manner and to tackle the most important current challenges identified by the software industry and software research com- nity––namely, the shift of focus from "products" to "services. ” The technical program featured invited talks, research papers, and experience reports on the most relevant topics related to processes for developing software-intensive services and products. In addition, a number of workshops and tutorials were hosted.