Author Description

The ICSSP conference, continuing the success of the Software Process Workshop (SPW), the Workshop on Software Process Simulation Modeling (ProSim) and the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) conference series, has become an established premier event in the field of software and systems engineering. It provides a leading forum for the exchange of academic research results and industrial best-practices in process development and evolution on software and systems disciplines. Software and system process decision-making is becoming more challenging for development organizations. These organizations are incorporating engineering advances, seeking to meet expectations of their customers, and responding to the economic pressures of markets. The resulting demands on processes include the need for both well-developed plans and incremental deliveries (agile and hybrid processes), utilization of increased automation (model-based engineering and DevOps), higher degrees of customer collaboration, comprehensive analysis of existing products for reuse (open source and COTS), and performance requirements of enterprise-level architectures. In response to these demands, process stakeholders--process engineers responsible for designing and implementing processes, managers or coaches who staff and guide them, researchers who study and improve them, tools developers who support and facilitate them, and developers and sustainers who use and tailor them--are producing more varieties of processes and doing so more often. Just as agility is required more frequently in product development, it is also being demanded in processes while maintaining their essential purposes of coordination and communication. Demands on processes are requiring processes on demand. Providing processes on demand is challenging for process designers. They must be able to select compatible process elements for a specific set of situational factors, to assess the risks in and forecast outcomes of a pro