Guest editors' introduction

Processes are ubiquitous in the modern Software and Software Systems Engineering world. Software and software systems development use processes as one major means for achieving and ensuring the quality of the final product. This leads to specific challenges regarding software processes such as simplicity, adaptability, standard conformance, the coordination of multiple domains and life cycles, etc. Processes from other domains (e.g. health care, manufacturing, business, aerospace, automotive systems, and others) face similar challenges. Moreover, they share interesting similarities with and differences to software processes. The question is: How can we in the software domain learn from other domains to meet our software process engineering challenges? During the evolution history of this conference series, from 1984 to 1996, the International Software Process Workshops attracted many academic researchers and industrial practitioners. Then came the International Conference on the Software Process (ICSP, from 1991 until 1996), the International Workshop on Software Process Simulation and Modeling (ProSim, from 1998 until 2006), and the Software Process Workshop (SPW, in 2005 and 2006). ProSim and SPW were held together in 2006 and merged in 2007 to form the new International Conference on Software Process. In 2009, the third ICSP conference was held in Vancouver, Canada, on May 16–17, 2009, and was co-located with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2009). The International Conference on Software and System Process (ICSSP) conferences continue the successful ICSP conference series, while broadening ICSP’s scope of software development processes to system development and explicitly including processes of other domains such as health care, business, and manufacturing. By sharing process development theories and practices from such domains, ICSSP 2012 aimed at investigating novel solutions to today’s process challenges. The theme of ICSSP 2012 was ‘Beyond Software and Software Systems Processes’. There were 70 submissions (including 48 full papers and 22 short papers) to the conference that were received from 27 countries and regions including Algeria, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Finland, France, Germany, Iran, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, UK, and USA. After a rigorous review process, 27 papers were accepted for the proceedings of the ICSSP 2012 including 16 full papers and 11 short papers. After the conference, a call for papers was broadcast to the software engineering (SE) community at large through the SE-World mailing list for a special issue on Software and Systems Process. In addition, invitations were sent to eight of the authors who had accepted papers at the conference papers including the keynotes and panel session authors to expand and submit their papers for consideration in the special issue. Papers were submitted and reviewed. Based on the reviews, the program committee selected five papers to be included in this special issue of the Journal of Software Evolution and Process. Each of the five papers that were finally accepted went through several rounds of revision. The remainder of this guest editors’ introduction provides an overview to the articles in this special issue. Processes and applications share many important characteristics and are amenable to similar approaches to modeling, definition, and analysis. As opposed to his previous work, where approaches and technologies for developing applications have been applied to the development of processes with fruitful results, Leon J. Osterweil, in his keynote paper ‘Learning About Application Software by Studying Processes’, suggests the opposite, namely that approaches and technologies for developing processes be likewise applicable to developing applications. As an example, Lee notes that resource specification, allocation and management as well as management of rework are central issues in the development of many processes, which are equally important for developing application software.