International Conference on Software and System Processes
ICSSP 2016 -- May 14-15, 2016

Process in Action

Many of today's major products and services rely on software to deliver their core capabilities and value. Depending on the product and service, companies have to address a complex array of requirements, regulations and competitive forces. These factors imply different business models and different means for developing the software. Highly specified, formal processes and high assurance quality requirements drive Mission and safety critical projects. On the other end of the spectrum, managers and developers seek lightweight methods allowing for creativity and rapid development and customer value creation. Through the years, researchers have supported organizations by creating different development lifecycle models, maturity models, processes, best practices, testing approaches, development environments, and so forth. These have all had an impact on the engineering of software.

The International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) 2016 seeks papers in the many exciting areas of research going on in the domain of Software and Systems process. At the same time, the theme of this year's conference is on studying Process(es) in Action and recognizing that the AS-Planned and AS-Practiced processes can be quite different. As a result, meaningful research questions arise:

What context dependent modifications occurred on a project? Why are specific changes made and what were are the effects? How can agile development be adapted to mission-critical and complex software and systems development activities to accelerate development or improve quality? How can experience and knowledge from practice used to improve process design in those areas? How is data collected and how reliable is the data collected in improvement programs? Is required data available at all? And, finally, what are the implications for the software process?

ICSSP believes there is a strong need to bring practitioners and scientists together to discuss the role of the software process in current and future development of complex systems and in rapidly changing markets. To encourage these discussions and collaborative research, ICSSP announces the call for submissions to ICSSP 2016 - a proven forum for the exchange of research outcomes and industrial best practices in process development.

ICSSP 2016 is seeking full and short papers addressing research and industry best practice related to:

• The tension of bridging the gap between theory and practice,
• Improving process-readiness for future software and systems development, and
• Process improvement and collaboration, and
• All crucial facets in the development and evolution of software and systems.

Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to:

• State of the art and state of the practice reports, including (but not limited to) empirical evidence of the effectiveness of Agile/Lean practices and approaches
• Process modeling, simulation and analysis, including (but not limited to) design/modeling approaches, pragmatic and formal modeling, informal interactions in formal processes, and hybrid development processes
• Agile, traditional, and hybrid processes in non-software domains (e.g., business, health care, manufacturing, transportation, etc.) with a demonstrated relationship to software process challenges
• Software and systems engineering processes, including (but not limited to) development and management processes for complex system evolution, scaling up/down processes for development of Cyber-Physical Systems, integration of COTS and Open Source components, development and evolution of adaptive systems, and rapid development of mission-critical and reliable systems
• Process/Project management and assessment, measurement, metrics and tools
• Distributed/Global development using Agile and large-scale processes
• Continuous process improvement in diverse areas and context
• Processes for cutting-edge software technologies, including (but not limited to) drones, ubiquitous computing, cloud computing, multi-core technologies, and cellular technologies
• Process challenges for future technologies, such as nanotechnology, constructed materials, and other software-like development activities.
• Empirical studies and experience reports, encompassing complete or parts of software and systems development lifecycle

ICSSP 2016 is interested in contributions to this conversation by a wide variety of authors, researchers and thought leaders. We invite the following submissions:

• Full papers that reflect completed and evaluated research on novel approaches to major software and systems engineering process challenges and in-depth experience reports of significance for the community.
• Short papers that describe less complete work-in-progress research papers (e.g. Ph.D work research) or conceptual and position papers addressing open research questions and future research directions.

All accepted full and short papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library within its International Conference Proceedings Series.

Enhanced versions of the awarded best research papers will be included in a special issue of the Journal of Software: Evolution and Process.