Context Most software companies strive to have high-performing teams and mitigate withdrawal behaviors like being present but unproductive. In this context, psychological safety and developers’ perceived impact are suggested as potential drivers of voice and silence behaviors. However, understanding these social aspects of software development entails the incorporation of social science theories. Objective This study aims to empirically explore the relationships among software professionals’ perceived impact, psychological safety, voice and silence behaviors, burnout particularly withdrawal and performance using a theoretical model. Method A survey questionnaire was conducted, resulting in 158 valid responses from software development teams. Then, we analyzed the responses using structural equation modeling (SEM) and a novel semi-confirmatory SEM. All variables were measured using pre-validated instruments. Results The findings supported the theoretical model, showing that psychological safety was more related to silence than voice, whereas perceived impact showed a stronger relationship with voice than with silence. Furthermore, silence contributed to higher burnout, whereas voice alleviated it. In contrast, silence showed a negative association with performance, whereas voice was positively associated with it. Conclusions This study examines the direct effects of perceived impact and psychological safety on voice and silence behaviors. Additionally, it examines the direct effects of these behaviors on burnout and task performance among software professionals. Consequently, the findings offer both theoretical and practical insights.

Software development industries are increasingly adopting containers to enhance the scalability and flexibility of applications. Security in containerized projects is a critical challenge that can lead to data breaches and performance degradation, thereby directly affecting the reliability and operations of the container services. Despite the ongoing effort to manage the security issues in containerized projects in SE research, more investigations are needed to explore the human perspective of security management in containerized projects. This research aims to explore security management in containerized projects by exploring how SE practitioners manage the security issues in containerized projects. A clear understanding of security management in containerized projects will enable industries to develop robust security strategies that enhance software reliability and trust. To achieve this, we conducted two semi-structured interview studies to examine how practitioners approach security management. The first study focused on practitioners’ perceptions of security challenges in containerized environments, where we interviewed 15 participants between December 2022 and October 2023. The second study explored how to address security issues, with 20 participants interviewed between October 2024 and December 2024. Data analysis reveals how SE practitioners address the various security challenges in containerized projects. Our analysis also identified the technical and non-technical enablers that can be utilized to enhance security in containerized projects. Overall, we propose a conceptual model that visualizes how practitioners manage security issues in containerized projects. We argue that our proposed model will guide practitioners in making informed decisions to plan, develop, and deploy secure container systems.

Abstract Context Data visualizations and dashboards are essential in disseminating information to broad audiences. However, designing these instruments is complex due to the multitude of involved factors. Theoretical frameworks are therefore critical to guide the design and implementation of data visualizations. Objective This article presents the approach used to pinpoint key features that impact the creation of information visualizations, organize these features using meta‐modelling, and validate the final artefact through expert judgement. Method Meta‐modelling facilitates the distillation of characteristics and functionalities critical for the development of information systems. Utilizing this method, a dashboard meta‐model was constructed in preceding research, yielding a framework of abstract components and connections to delineate specific products. This meta‐model serves as a robust tool for the automated generation of information visualizations and dashboards. Nonetheless, to confirm its quality and efficacy, it underwent a thorough quality assessment and expert evaluation to identify and address potential shortcomings. Results The validation process resulted in positive ratings and constructive feedback to enhance the meta‐model's present iteration. Experts mainly highlighted the meta‐model's complexity and the clarity of certain entities, noting potential confusion for non‐experts. Conclusions While the meta‐model is confirmed to be a coherent and pertinent tool, it requires additional clarifications to simplify its complexity. Addressing this, graphical interfaces have been developed to enable users to interact with the dashboard meta‐model—and to create dashboard instances—through straightforward interactions.

Abstract Context Software Fault Prediction (SFP) leverages supervised Machine Learning to detect faulty software constructs using software metrics and corresponding labels. Despite recent advances in Deep Learning (DL) for tabular data, their application to SFP remains underexplored. Objectives This study proposes a novel feature selection method, CorrBoost, which combines correlation analysis and XGBoost to address feature dimensionality. Additionally, we evaluate existing tabular DL architectures, super convergent deep neural networks (sDNN) and TabNet for SFP. Methods Using 26 public datasets from NASA, PROMISE, and AEEEM repositories, we apply the adaptive synthetic oversampling technique to manage class imbalance. We compare DL models with five state-of-the-art techniques and two gradient-boosted tree models (XGBoost and LightGBM) using AUC-ROC, AUPRC, and Accuracy. Statistical significance is validated using the Bayesian Signed Rank Test and Scott-Knott ESD. Results Gradient-boosted trees and existing state-of-the-art models outperform DL methods in AUC-ROC by 17.9% and 9.6%, respectively. CorrBoost achieves a 55% average reduction in feature dimensionality with negligible performance loss. DL methods, however, incur significantly higher processing time and perform poorly on unseen test data. Conclusion CorrBoost combined with boosted tree models offers a superior trade-off between performance and computation. While tabular DL architectures hold promise, they currently lag behind traditional methods for SFP on real-world data.

This special issue comprises a selected set of high quality and extended articles of the 29th Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement (EuroSPI) Conference, held in 2022 in Salzburg, Austria.Conferences were held in Dublin (Ireland) in 1994, in Vienna (Austria) in 1995, in Brighton (UK) in 1996, in Budapest (Hungary) in 1997, in Gothenburg (Sweden) in 1998, in Pori (Finland) in 1999, in Copenhagen (Denmark) in 2000, in Limerick (Ireland) in 2001, in Nuremberg (Germany) in 2002, in Graz (Austria) in 2003, in Trondheim (Norway) in 2004, in Budapest (Hungary) in 2005, in Joensuu (Finland) in 2006, in Potsdam (Germany) in 2007, in Dublin (Ireland) in 2008, in Alcala (Spain) in 2009, in Grenoble (France) in 2010, in Roskilde (Denmark) in 2011, in Vienna (Austria) in 2012, in Dundalk (Ireland) in 2013, in Luxembourg in 2014, in Ankara (Turkey) in 2015, in Graz (Austria) in 2016, in Ostrava (Czech Republic) in 2017, in Bilbao (Spain) in 2018, in Edinburgh (UK) in 2019, in Düsseldorf (Germany) in 2020, in Krems (Austria) in 2021, and in Salzburg (Austria) in 2022.EuroSPI is an initiative with the following major action lines (http:// www. euros pi. net)

Context: The application of Software Fault Prediction (SFP) in the software development life cycle to predict the faulty class at the early stage has piqued the interest of various scholars. In the SFP domain, during research analysis, it got realized that there has been very little work instigated on addressing both class imbalance and feature redundancy problems jointly to enhance the performance and prediction accuracy of SFP models. It has been perceived in the literature survey the study of droughts with the comprehensive comparative analysis of different sampling and feature selection strategies together. Objective: This research builds an extensive assessment of distinct combinations of different feature selection and sampling approaches, to effectively overcome the problems of class overlap, class imbalance , and feature redundancy. The objective is to determine the best combination that will produce results with a higher degree of accuracy and an effective SFP model. Method: Considering the above erudition, the study has applied 8 different sampling techniques along with 10 feature selection algorithms against 56 open-source projects. The comparative analysis is performed against 5346 variants of input datasets by applying 8 different classifiers to predict the faulty class. In addition, the research paper presents an intensive assessment and performance of these techniques individually against all the input projects. We have considered accuracy and Area Under the ROC (receiver operating characteristic curve) Curve (AUC) performance metrics to compare the performance of different models developed using the classification algorithm . Result: For each project in the proposed work, we evaluated a total of 792 combinations that were produced using 10 feature selection methods, 1 all metrics dataset, 8 sampling methods, 1 original, unsampled dataset, and 8 classifiers. The empirical result indicates that, against 21 projects out of 54 projects, Synthetic Minority Over Sampling Technique Edited (SMOTEE) with correlation-based feature selection (FS2) combination outperformed with the highest AUC value which is 38.89 % of projects. Additionally, according to experimental results, the highest AUC values were attained by 24.07 % of projects using the SMOTEE, FS2, and RF combination. Conclusion: The results of the statical analysis test reveal that 93.42 % of the combinational pairs of different sampling and feature selection approaches demonstrated a significant variance in the performance of the distinct combinations of sampling and feature selection techniques. The empirical result indicates the performance of the SFP Model is adversely impacted by class imbalance and irrelevance. The outcome indicates for more than 75% of projects, the performance of trained models improved with an AUC value between a range of 0.805 to 0.99 post-application of sampling and feature selection strategies, in comparison without the use of feature selection and sampling techniques.

New concepts based on the Internet of Things propose the integration of the human factor as a key component of novel interconnected ecosystems, to offer them new services and features. However, the data acquisition process, carried out by the devices that allow the deployment of these new paradigms, leads to concerns about what kind of information these entities are able to collect and/or infer. In fact, in most cases, users are not aware that their information is being gathered, nor can they properly control these data flows. Nowadays, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation calls for the adoption of transparent practices comprising, inter alia, adequate notification mechanisms, proper consent management schemes, and the development of models to empower the user as an active participant, with full control over the data flows, along with privacy preservation techniques. In this specific context, the aim of this manuscript is to present a review of existing user-centric privacy preservation models. This is, as far as we know, one of the few papers that addresses this particular privacy preserving dimension within an IoT context. Finally, the paper identifies and summarizes open issues, including a discussion of research opportunities in this area.

This special issue comprises a selected set of high quality and extended articles of the 27th Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement (EuroSPI) Conference, held in 2020 in Düsseldorf, Germany (Figure 1). Conferences were held in Dublin (Ireland) in 1994, in Vienna (Austria) in 1995, in Brighton (UK) in 1996, in Budapest (Hungary) in 1997, in Gothenburg (Sweden) in 1998, in Pori (Finland) in 1999, in Copenhagen (Denmark) in 2000, in Limerick (Ireland) in 2001, in Nuremberg (Germany) in 2002, in Graz (Austria) in 2003, in Trondheim (Norway) in 2004, in Budapest (Hungary) in 2005, in Joensuu (Finland) in 2006, in Potsdam (Germany) in 2007, in Dublin (Ireland) in 2008, in Alcala (Spain) in 2009, in Grenoble (France) in 2010, in Roskilde (Denmark) in 2011, in Vienna (Austria) in 2012, in Dundalk (Ireland) in 2013, in Luxembourg in 2014, in Ankara (Turkey) in 2015, in Graz (Austria) in 2016, in Ostrava (Czech Republic) in 2017, in Bilbao (Spain) in 2018, in Edinburgh (UK) in 2019, and in Düsseldorf (Germany) in 2020. EuroSPI has a cooperation with the EU Blueprint for Batteries project ALBATTS (2020–2023) where leading European industry discusses and establishes a skills agenda to build a European battery production capability for the electrification of European e-mobility. EuroSPI has established the SPI Manifesto, a set of social media groups including a selection of presentations and key notes freely available on YouTube and access to job role-based qualification through the European Certification and Qualification Association (www.ecqa.org). A typical characterization of EuroSPI is reflected in a statement made by a company: “… the biggest value of EuroSPI lies in its function as a European knowledge and experience exchange mechanism for SPI and innovation.” Since its beginning in 1994 in Dublin, the EuroSPI initiative continuously develops the term SPI including more and more fields that contribute. During the years, new communities (Cybersecurity, Internet of Things, Agile, etc …) joined and the term EuroSPI2 became European System, Software, Service, Safety, and Security Process, Product, Programming Improvement, Innovation, and Infrastructure. So in fact it became EuroS5P3I3. In this issue, selected papers from EuroSPI'2020 are presented. In what follows, editors introduce these papers discussing their contribution and highlighting their importance with regards to relevant literature. The paper “The Development of Data Analytics Maturity Assessment Framework: DAMAF” by Mert Onuralp Gökalp, Ebru Gökalp, Selin Gökalp, and Altan Koçyiğit presents a Data Analytics Maturity Assessment Framework that evaluates the organizational data analytics maturity in a staged manner. The presented framework aims to determine the current organizational data analytics maturity level and also provides a comprehensive roadmap to improve organizational data analytics capabilities in a structured way. Although the topic of data analytics maturity is not new, for example, in previous studies [1, 2], and there is even a review on the topic [3], the approach taken by authors is following the path driven by classic software process maturity models, Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), for instance, and also new developments in the software arena [4, 5] presenting maturity levels in a staged manner. “Symptom-based improvement recommendations” is authored by Jan Pries-Heje, Jørn Johansen, and Morten Korsaa. In this paper, authors present an experience-based method to recommend areas of improvement in organizations. Based on the takeaways of 300 CMMI assessments, authors use cognitive maps and the “five whys” technique to look beyond the symptoms and reveal the underlying problems or causes of the problems. Improvement is a nuclear topic inside EuroSPI community and in software community as a whole, publishing several works in the arena [6-8]; the work by Pries-Heje and colleagues draws a path towards specific recommendations inside improvement endeavors. In “Teamwork quality in technology-driven product teams in large-scale agile organizations” by Alexander Poth, Mario Kottke, Torsten Mahr, and Andreas Riel, authors present the Technical Team Maturity (TTM) approach. TTM is aimed to foster transparency, autonomy, and structured team development modeling competence needs in a structured way. Agility has been a de facto standard for software teams over the last years [9], and its evolution towards large-scale scenarios is a hot topic for software researchers [10, 11]. In this paper, authors focus on teamwork quality as a key factor in large-scale agile organizations. In the paper “A Novel Approach for Visualization, Monitoring and Control Techniques for Scrum Metric Planning using the Analytic Hierarchy Process,” Nesib Tekin, Murat Yilmaz, and Paul Clarke present a study to determine the effect of the multicriteria decision-making process, Analytic Hierarchy Process, to select a set of software metrics components suitable for a software domain, more specifically for Scrum settings. This paper is also linked with agile methods and more precisely with Scrum. The use of metrics in these environments is crucial to assist on the assessment of the quality of the software process [12], and the use of multicriteria decision-making tools, following the path by [13], is a sound way to select metrics in such environments. “Process Improvement Guidance for Automotive - Successful SPI Implementation Practices” is authored by Richard Messnarz, Thomas Wegner, Damjan Ekert, Bernhardt Steger, Ralf Mayer, Rainer Dreves, Bernhard Sechser, Christian Schlager, and Christoph Karner. In this work, authors evolve current VDA (Verein der Deutschen Automobilindustrie) Guidelines by including a process improvement mechanism based on ISO/IEC 33014:2013 and mapped to SPI Manifesto Values and Principles. Automotive is also the functional arena in the paper “Towards a Security-driven Automotive Development Lifecycle,” authored by Jürgen Dobaj, Georg Macher, Damjan Ekert, Andreas Riel, and Richard Messnarz. In the paper, authors present an actionable cybersecurity development lifecycle model that provides concrete action and work product guidance aligned with the ISO/SAE 21434 and Automotive SPICE® extension for cybersecurity. Automotive software is a relatively new, but important research field [14] and these two papers are directing two different but crucial challenges: SPI Implementation practices and the integration of security in the automotive software development lifecycle. Finally, in “Integrating Privacy Debt and VSE's software developments,” the concept of Privacy Debt is introduced by Santamaria, Larrucea, and Fernandez-Gauna. Based on the works on Technical Debt, authors also identify privacy aspects inside ISO/IEC 29110 basic profile and introduce a way to calculate Privacy Debt in these environments. Although the concept of Technical Debt is not new [15] and in the last 10 years has produced a wide set of academic contributions [16], the investigation of privacy aspects is new in the literature and deserves attention. The editorial work of this special issue has been supported by the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology, the Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy, and the Province of Upper Austria in the frame of the COMET center SCCH. EuroSPI has a long-lasting relationship with Wiley publishing selected papers with high industrial experience value extended in special issues of the journal “Software Process: Improvement and Practice” starting in 2004, continuing the earlier tradition [17] with the “Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice” and the “Journal of Software: Evolution and Process.” Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Abstract This special issue comprises a selected set of high‐quality and extended articles of the 28th Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement (EuroSPI) Conference, held in 2021 in Krems, Austria. Conferences were held in Dublin (Ireland) in 1994, in Vienna (Austria) in 1995, in Brighton (UK) in 1996, in Budapest (Hungary) in 1997, in Gothenburg (Sweden) in 1998, in Pori (Finland) in 1999, in Copenhagen (Denmark) in 2000, in Limerick (Ireland) in 2001, in Nuremberg (Germany) in 2002, in Graz (Austria) in 2003, in Trondheim (Norway) in 2004, in Budapest (Hungary) in 2005, in Joensuu (Finland) in 2006, in Potsdam (Germany) in 2007, in Dublin (Ireland) in 2008, in Alcala (Spain) in 2009, in Grenoble (France) in 2010, in Roskilde (Denmark) in 2011, in Vienna (Austria) in 2012, in Dundalk (Ireland) in 2013, in Luxembourg in 2014, in Ankara (Turkey) in 2015, in Graz (Austria) in 2016, in Ostrava (Czech Republic) in 2017, in Bilbao (Spain) in 2018, in Edinburgh (UK) in 2019, in Düsseldorf (Germany) in 2020, and in Krems (Austria) in 2021.

Background: DevOps is currently one of the main trends in software development. Low-Code is also an emerging tendency that, combined with DevOps, may offer significant value to software businesses by improving the process. However, how DevOps practices and low-code are combined is little known. Aim: This study aims to understand the practitioner's perspectives on low-code trends. Method: Twelve interviews with IT professionals who deal with low-code in the context of DevOps were conducted. Then, a grounded theory approach was used to theme the interview quotes into emergent categories. Results: The main result of this exploratory study reveals that such an approach is the most common response to the skill shortages of software professionals. Conclusion: This study suggests the emergence of DevOps and low-code could significantly contribute to the development of quality products with low-cost and time.

Abstract Context Tangled commits are changes to software that address multiple concerns at once. For researchers interested in bugs, tangled commits mean that they actually study not only bugs, but also other concerns irrelevant for the study of bugs. Objective We want to improve our understanding of the prevalence of tangling and the types of changes that are tangled within bug fixing commits. Methods We use a crowd sourcing approach for manual labeling to validate which changes contribute to bug fixes for each line in bug fixing commits. Each line is labeled by four participants. If at least three participants agree on the same label, we have consensus. Results We estimate that between 17% and 32% of all changes in bug fixing commits modify the source code to fix the underlying problem. However, when we only consider changes to the production code files this ratio increases to 66% to 87%. We find that about 11% of lines are hard to label leading to active disagreements between participants. Due to confirmed tangling and the uncertainty in our data, we estimate that 3% to 47% of data is noisy without manual untangling, depending on the use case. Conclusion Tangled commits have a high prevalence in bug fixes and can lead to a large amount of noise in the data. Prior research indicates that this noise may alter results. As researchers, we should be skeptics and assume that unvalidated data is likely very noisy, until proven otherwise.

In general, people are usually more reluctant to follow advice and directions from politicians who do not have their ideology. In extreme cases, people can be heavily biased in favour of a political party at the same time that they are in sharp disagreement with others, which may lead to irrational decision making and can put people’s lives at risk by ignoring certain recommendations from the authorities. Therefore, considering political ideology as a psychographic trait can improve political micro-targeting by helping public authorities and local governments to adopt better communication policies during crises. In this work, we explore the reliability of determining psychographic traits concerning political ideology. Our contribution is twofold. On the one hand, we release the PoliCorpus-2020, a dataset composed by Spanish politicians’ tweets posted in 2020. On the other hand, we conduct two authorship analysis tasks with the aforementioned dataset: an author profiling task to extract demographic and psychographic traits, and an authorship attribution task to determine the author of an anonymous text in the political domain. Both experiments are evaluated with several neural network architectures grounded on explainable linguistic features, statistical features, and state-of-the-art transformers. In addition, we test whether the neural network models can be transferred to detect the political ideology of citizens. Our results indicate that the linguistic features are good indicators for identifying fine-grained political affiliation, they boost the performance of neural network models when combined with embedding-based features, and they preserve relevant information when the models are tested with ordinary citizens. Besides, we found that lexical and morphosyntactic features are more effective on author profiling, whereas stylometric features are more effective in authorship attribution.

Abstract Over the last 3 decades, researchers have attempted to shed light into the requirements traceability problem by introducing tracing tools, techniques, and methods with the vision of achieving ubiquitous traceability. Despite the technological advances, requirements traceability remains problematic for researchers and practitioners. This study aims to identify and investigate the main challenges in implementing (semi‐)automated requirements traceability, as reported in the recent literature. A systematic literature review was carried out based on the guidelines for systematic literature reviews in software engineering, proposed by Kitchenham. We retrieved 4530 studies by searching five major bibliographic databases and selected 70 primary studies. These studies were analysed and classified according to the challenges they present and/or address. Twenty‐one challenges were identified and were classified into five categories. Findings reveal that the most frequent challenges are technological challenges, in particular, low accuracy of traceability recovery methods. Findings also suggest that future research efforts should be devoted to the human facet of tracing, to explore traceability practices in organisational settings, and to develop traceability approaches that support agile and DevOps practices. Finally, it is recommended that researchers leverage blockchain technology as a suitable technical solution to ensure the trustworthiness of traceability information in interorganisational software projects.

Background: Medical device development projects must follow proper directives and regulations to be able to market and sell the end-product in their respective territories. The regulations describe requirements that seem to be opposite to efficient software development and short time-to-market. As agile approaches, like DevOps, are becoming more and more popular in software industry, a discrepancy between these modern methods and traditional regulated development has been reported. Although examples of successful adoption in this context exist, the research is sparse. Aims: The objective of this study is twofold: to review the current state of DevOps adoption in regulated medical device environment; and to propose a checklist based on that review for introducing DevOps in that context. Method: A multivocal literature review is performed and evidence is synthesized from sources published between 2015 to March of 2020 to capture the opinions of experts and community in this field. Results: Our findings reveal that adoption of DevOps in a regulated medical device environment such as ISO 13485 has its challenges, but potential benefits may outweigh those in areas such as regulatory, compliance, security, organizational and technical. Conclusion: DevOps for regulated medical device environments is a highly appealing approach as compared to traditional methods and could be particularly suited for regulated medical development. However, an organization must properly anchor a transition to DevOps in top-level management and be supportive in the initial phase utilizing professional coaching and space for iterative learning; as such an initiative is a complex organizational and technical task.

This volume comprises a selected set of high quality and extended articles of the 25th Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement (EuroSPI) Conference, held during September 5-7, 2018, in Bilbao, Spain.Conferences were held in Dublin (Ireland) in 1994, in Vienna (Austria) in 1995, in Brighton (UK) in 1996, in Budapest (Hungary) in 1997, in Gothenburg (Sweden) in 1998, in Pori (Finland) in 1999, in Copenhagen (Denmark) in 2000, in Limerick (Ireland) in 2001, in Nuremberg (Germany) in 2002, in Graz (Austria) in 2003, in Trondheim (Norway) in 2004, in Budapest (Hungary) in 2005, in Joensuu (Finland) in 2006, in Potsdam (Germany) in 2007, in Dublin (Ireland) in 2008, in Alcala (Spain) in 2009, in Grenoble (France) in 2010, in Roskilde (Denmark) in 2011, in Vienna (

Abstract This volume comprises a selected set of high‐quality and extended articles of the 26th Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement (EuroSPI) Conference, held during September 18–20, 2019 in Edinburgh, UK. Conferences were held in Dublin (Ireland) in 1994, in Vienna (Austria) in 1995, in Brighton (UK) in 1996, in Budapest (Hungary) in 1997, in Gothenburg (Sweden) in 1998, in Pori (Finland) in 1999, in Copenhagen (Denmark) in 2000, in Limerick (Ireland) in 2001, in Nuremberg (Germany) in 2002, in Graz (Austria) in 2003, in Trondheim (Norway) in 2004, in Budapest (Hungary) in 2005, in Joensuu (Finland) in 2006, in Potsdam (Germany) in 2007, in Dublin (Ireland) in 2008, in Alcala (Spain) in 2009, in Grenoble (France) in 2010, in Roskilde (Denmark) in 2011, in Vienna (Austria) in 2012, in Dundalk (Ireland) in 2013, in Luxembourg in 2014, in Ankara (Turkey) in 2015, in Graz (Austria) in 2016, in Ostrava (Czech Republic) in 2017, in Bilbao (Spain) in 2018, and in Edinburgh (UK) in 2019.

Abstract Blockchain is considered as a major emerging technology that is having an ever‐increasing spread both in industrial and academic contexts. As the usage of blockchain keeps increasing, a fourth generation of blockchain platforms is being proposed. Thus, applications of blockchain have evolved towards wider scopes than cryptocurrency and asset management. In this context, it is important for practitioners to have deep understanding of various blockchain assessment initiatives. Therefore, this work discusses blockchain assessment initiatives from a technology evolution viewpoint. Furthermore, a mapping was conducted to identify factors that impact blockchain initiatives, synthesize available evidence, and identify gaps between relevant approaches available in the literature. As a result, nine selected works were analyzed based on applicability, research approach, assessment process, blockchain adoption process, and blockchain waves. The findings can help practitioners to understand the main assessment factors that undermine blockchain implementations.

Being able to detect an infection at an early stage is a clinical problem of the utmost importance. An infection not diagnosed on time might not only severely affect the infected patient's health, but also to spread and start a focus of contagion to other people. In this paper, we propose a clinical decision support system to automatically diagnose infections using physiological signals from the patients. The focus of the system is put on being able to deal with very small amounts of data (one aggregated record per patient and day), which eases the potential of the system in environments with low resources. Data has been acquired between April 2018 and January 2019 in two nursing homes in Spain, where nurses had also tested patients for infections. Machine learning models have then been created by aggregating measurements from days prior to the infection (lead) and after the infection started (lag) in order to generate features. The best model attained reports an AUROC of 0.722, using data from up to two days after the infection started. Interestingly, an AUROC of up to 0.692 is achieved when infection prognosis is considered; i.e., using only measurements prior to the manual recording of the infection to compose the dataset.

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition due to the reaction to an infection. With certain changes in circulatory system, sepsis may progress to septic shock if it is left untreated. Therefore, early prognosis of septic shock may facilitate implementing correct treatment and prevent more serious complications. In this study, we assess the feasibility of applying a computer-aided prognosis system for septic shock. The system is envisaged as a tool to predict septic shock at the time of sepsis onset using only vital signs which are collected routinely in intensive care units (ICUs). To this end, we evaluate the performances of computational methods that take the sequence of vital signs acquired until sepsis onset as input and report the possibility of progressing to a septic shock before any further clinical analysis is performed. Results show that an adaptation of multivariate dynamic time warping can reveal higher accuracy than other known time-series classification methods on a new dataset built from a public ICU database. We argue that the use of computational intelligence methods can promote computer-aided prognosis of septic shock in hospitalized environment to a certain degree.

Organizations are needed of flexible structures to achieve their aims. In the software arena, Self-organization is the one of the principles of the agile methodologies as defined in the agile manifesto. Autonomous agile teams are a way to conform self-organization. The main objective of this paper is to know about the how autonomous agile teams organize themselves and what are the benefits and the challenges faced by these teams. A systematic literature review was conducted to find answers to these questions. 23 relevant papers were identified as primary sources to define and study autonomous and self-organized agile team. From the review, it was found that there are many benefits and challenges of autonomous agile teams and the various strategies to overcome the challenges.

Holacracy can be seen as a strategy for decentralized management and organizational governance in which authority and decision-making are delivered by means of autonomous and self-organizing groups or teams. Although the topic is not new, its application in software development has not a long history behind it. This study is meant to give an overview on holacracy for software development teams, its features, benefits gained, as well as its challenges. To do so, in this paper, authors present a multivocal literature review in which a panoply of sources including research and grey literature is reviewed. Our study shows that adapting holacracy towards self-organizing software development teams can result in increased product transparency, improved decision making, more efficient progress, and a higher sense of individual responsibility. However, there are reported challenges such as implementation difficulty and increase in employee outflows.

Healthcare systems have been improved in order to provide support to cross‐border situations where one citizen from one country travels to another country and requires the use of their health records. Several initiatives have been carried out to tackle this problem. This is the case for the OpenNCP which is supported by the European Commission by providing a common network and an infrastructure to connect different national healthcare systems which most of the times are cloud‐based systems. The OpenNCP plays a key role in communicating health records among European Union's member states, and therefore it manages sensitive information. Therefore, this study provides a security analysis of this platform and a prototype is developed for identifying secure patterns in source code.

Advances in system, software and service process improvement and innovationEuroSPI is an annual conference series devoted to Software Process Improvement (SPI), and the exchange of best practices in related domains organized since 1994.In 2009, EuroSPI created the SPI manifesto [1][2][3][4] and, also, enriched the term SPI over the last 25 years: System, Software, Services, Safety, Security Process and Product Improvement, Innovation, and Infrastructure (S 5 P 2 I 3 ).From 2017 onwards, EuroSPI created a set of thematic workshops, which deal with specific knowledge areas for the European 2030 agenda.Big changes towards networked societies, self-driving cars and planes, new e-mobility concepts will arise, and more exchange of best practices will be needed to support these new developments.Lead papers from those thematic topics will be selected for the journal in the years to follow.EuroSPI 2017 received a large amount of submissions from authors.All submissions were peer reviewed by top experts in the given research area.From the set of accepted papers, seven articles were selected for their publication in this special issue based on established quality criteria, novelty, and interest.Editors hope this new set is able to provide insights on software process, its evolution, and new developments to practitioners and researchers alike.In what follows, the seven papers are presented and briefly discussed:

Selected functional safety and cybersecurity concerns in system, software, and service process improvement and innovationIn this editorial, we present a set of papers related to the European System and Software Process Improvement and Innovation Initiative (EuroSPI 2 ) launched back in 1994.With more than 20 editions of the conference and around 20 special issues devoted to the initiative 1-13 with the majority of them published in the Journal of Software: Evolution and Process and its predecessors, the community has contributed vastly to the development of the discipline.This special issue presents papers sent as extended versions of previous papers published in the proceedings including also papers indirectly linked to the conference.The focus of this special issue is functional safety and cybersecurity as related to software and service improvement and innovation.Nowadays, nearly all organizations depend on appropriate secure and compliant information processing based on different software systems.14 As a consequence of this importance, the EuroSPI 2 community has approached the topic from a panoply of viewpoints including traceability aspects, 15 safety and availability improvement, 16 process assessment in safety, 17 and action research approaches in financial organizations, 18 naming just some of the more recent and relevant initiatives.This special issue enhances previous efforts by providing an updated and extended view on the implications of security aspects in the service and process improvement and innovation arena.The paper "Extending Automotive SPICE 3.0 for the Use in ADAS and Future Self-Driving Service Architectures" by Richard Messnarz, Christian Kreiner, Georg Macher, and Alastair Walker summarizes the current state of the art and extends the existing concepts of a service architecture supporting the car-to-car and car-to-cloud communication.This leads to an additional service life cycle model that can be plugged into Automotive SPICE (Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination) 3.01.The article also shows an example of a process that needs to be assessed as well to cover not only the vehicle but also the entire service architecture in an assessment and analysis.The paper "Software Quality Model for a Research-driven Organization-An Experience Report" by Marcin Wolski, Bartosz Walter, Szymon Kupiński, and Jakub Chojnacki presents a measurement framework for evaluating quality in software products developed within the research and innovation framework project GEANT2.The proposed framework is based on the quality models by Boehm 19 and McCall 20 but also presents

The European System and Software Process Improvement and Innovation Initiative (EuroSPI 2 ) was founded in 1994.EuroSPI 2 's mission is to develop an experience and knowledge exchange platform for Europe where SPI practices can be discussed and exchanged and knowledge can be gathered and shared.This mission is implemented by the following major action lines .• The annual EuroSPI 2 conference supported by Software Process Improvement Networks from different EU countries.EuroSPI took place

Abstract ISO/IEC 29110 is intended to help very small entities in improving their software processes. However, this standard is not the only initiative devoted to help organizations in these matters. For instance, ITMark is an established method with an important background in terms of number and diversity of assessments. The aim of this paper is to present a method to assess ISO/IEC 29110 by means of the evaluation performed under the ITMark certification schema built upon an experience factory. To do so, in this paper, authors present, firstly, a mapping for ITMark to ISO/IEC 29110 and, secondly, a study to test the applicability of the assessments made by ITMark in the ISO/IEC 29110 environment taking into account the previous mapping. The main conclusion from this industrial experience is that ITMark can be used as a method for assessing very small entities. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Process improvement approaches fertilised by advances in SPI A typical characterisation of EuroSPI was stated by a company using the following words:'… the biggest value of EuroSPI lies in its function as a European knowledge and experience exchange mechanism for SPI and innovation'.EuroSPI 2 2014 was held 25-27 June 2014 at Public Research Centre Henri Tudor, Luxembourg.In 2014, EuroSPI 2 continued with the open workshop communities aligned with the conference and focusing on specific SPI topics.This included, in 2014, the communities for creating environments supporting innovation and improvement, SPI and product-system-software design, SPICE assessors exchanging experiences about high maturity organisations, SPI and measurement, and SPI and business process innovation.The EuroSPI 2 2014 program had five international workshops on day 1, international key notes on days 2 and 3, more than 60 presentations from leading industry and leading research institutes, and a joint paper award with the American Society of Quality.Among the 26 countries represented at EuroSPI 2 2014, the contributions were highly relevant for the European and world-wide industry also appearing in this special issue.The SPI Manifesto, launched in 2009, created a future vision, the extension of SPI to the systems and product level, which led to the involvement of major European manufacturing firms, the building of workshop communities for specific topics creating further networking opportunities, and contributions including good practices about how to achieve the advances.Systems, software, and services process improvement is meanwhile a major learning and success factor world-wide for staying competitive on a global and dynamically developing world market.2. EUROSPI BOARD Since 1994, the EuroSPI initiative is financed and coordinated by a group of leading applied research companies and quality networks.Since 1998, the following board members have been important drivers for the initiative:

Abstract Information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) framework is a set of comprehensive publications providing descriptive guidance on the management of IT processes, functions, roles, and responsibilities related to IT service management. However, and in spite of its repercussion and popularity, the ITIL framework does not suggest an implementation order for their processes. This decision constitutes the first challenge that an organization must overcome when starting an ITIL implementation, the enterprise size being one of the leading factors to be considered in the decision‐making process. In the scenario of small and medium enterprises dedicated to producing software, this paper is devoted to investigating which processes are the most selected to start the implementation of ITIL in these organizations. This is performed by means of two different instruments, first, a systematic literature review on the topic and second, a survey conducted among experts and practitioners. Results show in both cases that incident management process should be the first process when implementing ITIL framework. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are flexible computing tools that have been applied to a wide range of domains with a notable level of accuracy. However, there are multiple choices of ANNs classifiers in the literature that produce dissimilar results. As a consequence of this, the selection of this classifier is crucial for the overall performance of the system. In this work, an integral framework is proposed for the optimization of different ANN classifiers based on statistical hypothesis testing. The framework is tested in a real ballistic scenario. The new quality measures introduced, based on the Student t‐test, and employed throughout the framework, ensure the validity of results from a statistical standpoint; they reduce the appearance of experimental errors or the appearance of possible randomness. Results show the relevance of this framework, proving that its application improves the performance and efficiency of multiple classifiers.

The skill shortage is becoming an ever-increasing challenge for IT departments. Allocation of resources in the best possible way is even more important. The challenge is to improve the enterprise not only on the side of the organizational and process level, but to develop new strategies and approaches in human resource management. Only a symbiosis of the disciplines economics, psychology and information technology will enable relevant and indispensable employees and promote loyalty to the company. A frequent change of the work place, for a well-trained professional, is so long associated with normality until they find the best environment for fulfilling their needs and expectations. These expectations are no longer just on a financial level. This paper will analyse the previous work on these topics and demonstrate first conclusions regarding a way forward.

EuroSPI established a newsletter series (newsletter.eurospi.net), the SPI Manifesto (SPI – Systems, Software and Service Process Improvement), an experience library (library.eurospi.net), which is continuously extended over the years and is made available to all attendees, and a Europe wide certification for qualifications in the SPI area (www.ecqa.org, European Certification and Qualification Association). A typical characterization of EuroSPI was stated by a company using the following words: ‘ the biggest value of EuroSPI lies in its function as a European knowledge and experience exchange mechanism for SPI and innovation’. EuroSPI22011 was held in Roskilde, a historical city in Denmark. Roskilde University was founded in 1972 with the objective of providing research and education at the highest level in the fields of natural science, social science, and the humanities. This year, EuroSPI continued with the open workshop communities aligned with the conference and focusing on specific SPI topics. This included creating Environments Supporting Innovation and Improvement, Integrated Design Principles, SPI in SMEs, Different Standards and Experiences with the Implementation of Functional Safety, Exchanging Experiences across Assessment Models, Researcher – Entrepreneur Qualification and Workshop, and Sourcing IT Workshop. Also, at EuroSPI 2011, we continued to extend the scope of the conference from software process improvement to systems, software service-based process improvement. Networking, experience exchange, and continuous improvement can help to create a competitive advantage on the market. Among the 26 countries represented at EuroSPI'2011, the contributions were highly relevant for the European and worldwide industry also appearing in this special issue. The SPI manifesto from 2009 created a future vision, the extension of SPI to the systems and product level led to involvement of major European manufacturing firms, the building of workshop communities for specific topics created further networking opportunities, and the contributions included good practices about how to achieve that. System, Software, and Service-based Process Improvement meanwhile is a major learning and success factor worldwide to stay competitive on a global and dynamically developing world market. The value of this selection of papers lies in the fact that they present actual industrial experiences. Research-oriented EuroSPI22011 papers were published in separate proceedings. This strategy reflects the EuroSPI multi-dimensional approach in which there are three fundamental components of process improvement known to be people and skills, process, and technology. A further component, which is considered in several papers in this special issue, is ‘business’. We will use these general components and their special approach to categorize the papers. Tim Kasse and Jørn Johansen discuss outsourcing relationships and how to deal with a situation where there is a difference between the maturity of the customer and the maturity of the supplier. This difference has an impact on the outsourcing business. Motoko Takeuchi, Yumi Koishi, and Kazunori SHIOYA discuss the ISO/IEC 29110 standard for Life Cycle Profiles for Very Small Entities and illustrate that in Japan, this is also used as a lean SPICE-based improvement method for departments in large enterprises. Péter Balázs Polgár and Ferenc Kazinci present experiences from the medical industry and show how the Eclipse Process Framework was used for establishing development processes. They also describe the standards, which are specific to the medical industry, and how they were considered in the modeling efforts. Badari Kotejoshyer, Birendra Singh, and Suhas Tittibha present experiences with requirements management in large Automotive and aerospace projects. They propose a specific set of attributes and relationships in a requirement management system, which allows to automatically analyze gaps and non-compliances. Javier Saldaña-Ramos, Ana Sanz-Esteban, Javier García-Guzmán, and Antonio Amescua-Seco look at Global Software Development from the viewpoint of skills and required roles. They describe a framework of roles, communications and skills as well as the role of a GSD expert/coach. Diego Martín, Javier García, Julián Urbano, and Antonio Amescua present a method to re-use process patterns and to build development processes from such process patterns. This re-use approach allows configuring and adapting processes to companies in a shorter time. Miguel-Angel Sicilia, Richard Messnarz, Miklos Biro, Elena García-Barriocanal, Miguel Garre-Rubio, Kerstin Siakas, Adrienne Clarke, and Sonja Koinig describe the new ISO 26000 standard for social responsibility and illustrate how this will impact SPI in the future. Tomas Schweigert and Andreas Nehfort present the new Test SPICE assessment model and discuss specific technical issues such as test automation, test environments, and test data. Timo Varkoi, Risto Nevalainen, and Timo Mäkinen discuss the Nuclear SPICE model and how it combines both SPICE-related generic requirements with functional safety and nuclear specific elements. Nuclear power industry is one of the most challenging domains worldwide because of its extreme safety requirements. The editors would like to express their thanks to the members of the EuroSPI22011 Industrial Programme Committee for their contribution to the review and selection of the papers: Bachmann Volker Ovi SIBAC GmbH Germany, Bæk Jørgensen Jens Mjølner Informatics A/S Denmark, Balstrup Bo Center for Software Innovation Denmark, Biró Miklós Software Competence Center Hagenberg, Austria, Breske Eva Robert Bosch GmbH Germany, Christiansen Mads DELTA Denmark, Daughtrey Taz James Madison University USA, Dussa-Zieger Klaudia Method Park Software AG Germany, Ekert Damjan ISCN GmbH Austria, Fehrer Detlef SICK AG Germany, Fenz Andrea Skills International GmbH Austria, Forselius Pekka 4SUM Partners Finland, Georicke Stephan iSQI GmbH Germany, Hagenmeyer Philipp ZF Friedrichshafen AG Germany, Hallikas Jarmo Falcon Leader Oy Finland, Hind Tim AXA UK, Johansen Jørn DELTA Axiom Denmark, Johansson Mika FiSMA Finland, Lichtenecker Gerhard Magna Steyr Austria, Messnarz Richard ISCN Ltd Austria/Ireland, Nevalainen Risto FiSMA Finland, Pikkarainen Minna VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Poth Alexander SQS Software Quality Systems AG Germany, Renault Samuel Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor Luxembourg, Romcea Cristina Conti Temic microelectronic GmbH Germany, Sauberer Gabriele TermNet Austria, Schweigert Tomas SQS Software Quality Systems AG Germany, Spork Gunther Magna Powertrain Austria, Stefanova-Pavlova Maria Center for Innovation and Technology Transfer-Global Bulgaria, and Von Bronk Peter Systemberatung Software-Qualität Germany

A typical characterization of EuroSPI was stated by a company using the following words: '… the biggest value of EuroSPI lies in its function as a European knowledge and experience exchange mechanism for SPI and innovation'. EuroSPI22012 was held for the second time in Vienna, the capital of Austria. In 2012, EuroSPI2 continued with the open workshop communities aligned with the conference and focusing on specific SPI topics. This included Creating Environments Supporting Innovation and Improvement, SPI and Product, System, Software Design, and SPICE Assessors: Exchanging Experiences Across Assessment Models, Business Process Innovation and Improvement, SPI and Measurement, and SPI in small-sized and medium-sized enterprises. Also, at EuroSPI22012, we continued to extend the scope of the conference from software process improvement to systems, software and services process improvement. Among the 26 countries represented at EuroSPI22012, the contributions were highly relevant for the European and worldwide industry also appearing in this special issue. The SPI Manifesto from 2009 created a future vision, the extension of SPI to the systems and product level led to the involvement of major European manufacturing firms, the building of workshop communities for specific topics created further networking opportunities, and the contributions included good practices about how to achieve that. Systems, software and services process improvement is meanwhile a major learning and success factor worldwide for staying competitive on a global and dynamic developing world market. In 2012, the Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems of Vienna University of Technology and the International Network for Terminology (TermNet) collaborated with this board to coordinate with EuroSPI22012. The value of this selection of papers lies in the fact that they present actual industrial experiences. Research-oriented EuroSPI22012 papers were published in separate proceedings. Since its beginning in 1994 in Dublin, the EuroSPI2 initiative outlines that there is no single silver bullet to solve SPI issues, but you need to understand a combination of different SPI methods and approaches to achieve real benefits. Therefore, each proceeding covers a variety of different topics and, at the conference, we discuss potential synergies and the combined use of such methods and approaches. This proceeding contains a selection of industrial experience papers leveraging SPI in various application domains, which reflect EuroSPI2's multidimensional approach with the three fundamental components of process improvement known to be people and skills, process, and technology. The paper by Phelim Dowling describes the transformation of a research project into a fully fledged commercial entity with an emphasis on the software process and quality methodologies used that in this case are mainly based on agile methods. In this paper, the author outlines how to engage in the software process, specifically agile, from an early stage transforming a research project into a commercial spinout. The paper 'Methodological framework for the allocation of work packages in GSD' by Ruano-Mayoral, Casado-Lumbreras, Garbarino-Alberti, and Misra presents and tests a framework devoted to allocate tasks among project participants in global software development settings. This framework is tested in real projects with promising results in terms of lower defects introduction and increased overall satisfaction from all parties. Onur Kaynak and N. Alpay Karagöz present an experience report about the integrated management of the ISO (International Organization for Standardization)/IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) 15504, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 20000, and ISO/IEC 9001:2008 in an information technology solutions provider company. This paper depicts the process improvement initiative challenges with the four different management systems. The paper by Hervé Cholez and Frédéric Girard proposes a method that is aimed to conduct a first assessment of enterprise information security maturity and consequently improves its process accordingly. The research work has been performed by the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor, Luxembourg in collaboration with the Luxembourg's Ministry of Economy and Foreign Trade and is specifically designed for small-sized and medium-sized enterprises. The paper by Martin McHugh, Fergal McCaffery, and Valentine Casey presents the results of a survey devoted to study the barriers on the adoption of agile practices in the medical device industry. Medical device developers must develop software in accordance with regulatory requirements and as a result, a number of the barriers to agile adoption are associated with the process of achieving regulatory conformance. Tomas Schweigert et al. present a study devoted to investigate agile Maturity Models by means of an industrial survey. Results show that we cannot find a common accepted agile Maturity Model, and extensive research on the area is needed to develop a common proposal from the information available. Hideto Ogasawara, Takumi Kusanagi, and Minoru Aizawa propose an SPI framework and introduce the results of SPI activities based on Toshiba's approach that has been implemented since 2000. The editors would like to express their thanks to the members of the EuroSPI22012 Industrial Programme Committee for their contribution to the review and selection of the papers: Bachmann Volker, SIBAC GmbH, Germany; Bæk Jørgensen Jens, Mjølner Informatics A/S, Denmark; Breske Eva, Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany; Christiansen Mads, DELTA, Denmark; Daughtrey Taz, James Madison University, USA; Dekkers Carol, Quality Plus Technologies, USA; Dussa-Zieger Klaudia, Method Park Software AG, Germany; Ekert Damjan, International Software Consulting Network Ltd GmbH, Austria; Fehrer Detlef, SICK AG, Germany; Fenz Andrea, Skills International GmbH, Austria; Forselius Pekka, 4SUM Partners, Finland; Georicke Stephan, International Software Quality Institute GmbH, Germany; Hagenmeyer Philipp, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Germany; Hallikas Jarmo, Falcon Leader Oy, Finland; Hällmayer Frank, Software Factory GmbH, Germany; Hind Tim, AXA, UK; İbrişim Ayşegül, Turkish Standards Institution, Turkey; Johansen Jørn, DELTA Axiom, Denmark; Johansson Mika, Finish Software Measurement Association, Finland; König Frank, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Germany; Messnarz Richard, ISCN Ltd, Austria/Ireland; Morgenstern Jens, Germany; Nevalainen Risto, FiSMA, Finland; O'Leary Eugene, EQN Ltd., Ireland; Poth Alexander, Software Quality Systems AG, Germany; Renault Samuel, Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor, Luxembourg; Romcea Cristina, Conti Temic microelectronic GmbH, Germany; Sauberer Gabriele, TermNet, Austria; Schweigert Tomas, SQS AG, Germany; Sechser Bernhard, Method Park, Germany; Spork Gunther, Magna Powertrain, Austria; Stefanova-Pavlova Maria, Center for Innovation and Technology Transfer-Global, Bulgaria; Von Bronk Peter, Systemberatung Software-Qualität, Germany; and Wegner Thomas, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Germany.

A typical characterization of EuroSPI was stated by a company using the following words: ‘ … the biggest value of EuroSPI lies in its function as a European knowledge and experience exchange mechanism for SPI and innovation’. EuroSPI22013 was held in Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland. In 2013, EuroSPI2 continued with the open workshop communities aligned with the conference and focusing on specific SPI topics. This included in 2013 the communities for Creating Environments Supporting Innovation and Improvement, SPI and Product-System-Software Design, SPICE Assessors Exchanging Experiences across Assessment Models, and SPI and Measurement. The EuroSPI 2013 program had four international workshops on day 1, and on the conference days 2 and 3 international key notes, more than 60 presentations from leading industry and leading research institutes, and a joint paper award with the American Society of Quality. EuroSPI 2013 also hosted a fourth conference day to celebrate 20 years of EuroSPI, which included a set of key notes to think about the next 20 years of SPI in the future. These anniversary key notes have been videotaped and are available online. Among the 26 countries represented at EuroSPI22013, the contributions were highly relevant for the European and worldwide industry also appearing in this special issue. The SPI manifesto from 2009 created a future vision, the extension of SPI to the systems and product level led to involvement of major European manufacturing firms, the building of workshop communities for specific topics created further networking opportunities, and the contributions included good practices about how to achieve that. Systems, software, and services process Improvement is meanwhile a major learning and success factor worldwide for staying competitive on a global and dynamically developing world market. In 2013, Dundalk Institute of Technology collaborated with this board to coordinate EuroSPI22013. The value of this selection of papers lies in the fact that they present actual industrial experiences. Research-oriented EuroSPI22013 papers were published in separate proceedings. Since its beginning in 1994 in Dublin, the EuroSPI2 initiative outlines that there is no single silver bullet to solve SPI issues but you need to understand a combination of different SPI methods and approaches to achieve real benefits. Therefore, each proceeding covers a variety of different topics, and at the conference, we discuss potential synergies and the combined use of such methods and approaches. This proceeding contains a selection of industrial experience papers leveraging SPI in various application domains, which reflect EuroSPI2's multi-dimensional approach with the three fundamental components of process improvement known to be people and skills, process, and technology. The paper by Filipe Albero Pomar, José Antonio Calvo-Manzano, Edgar Caballero, and Magdalena Arcilla-Cobián contributes to the improvement of our understanding of the software development process by presenting a thorough approach to identifying the root causes of issues arising in the context of Scrum implementations. Paraic Hegarty, Eoghan O'Leary, Danny Dineen, David Bustard, and Adrian Moore address the issue of the transition from an initial product developed for a specific commission to a software product line supporting curriculum management in higher education. The paper describes the experiences and identifies the general lessons learned. The exploitation of the shift from traditional knowledge management to networked knowledge sharing in information technology including the software industry is addressed by Ricardo Colomo-Palacios, Richard Messnarz, Kerstin Siakas, Daniel Palosi, and Darragh Coakley. The paper gives account among others of a newly available job role qualification program contributing to process improvement. Valuable lessons learned from experimentation and their use for the improvement of IT processes, in three different partially outsourced contexts, are presented in the paper by Stéphane Cortina, Alain Renault, and Michel Picard based on the TIPA® process assessment framework. The cost/benefit ratio of reaching Capability Maturity Model Integration maturity level 5 is often considered to be a priori disappointing. Lucas Grossi, José Antonio Calvo-Manzano, and Tomas San Feliu show the benefits of high maturity levels and present their experiences in coordinating the implementation in two constellations (Service and Development) in a consultancy company. Alberto Heredia, Javier Garcia-Guzman, Antonio Amescua-Seco, and Manuel Velasco-Diego address the development environment of the strongly emerging mobile app market. The paper adapts agile methodologies to the development of mass-market applications to provide project teams with a clear guide to successfully produce an app without missing any step in the process and also considering marketing issues. The paper by Masao Ito and Koichi Kishida considers the difficulties of separating safety and non-safety requirements when applying the ISO 26262 ‘Road vehicles – Functional safety’ standard whose scope is supported by the proposed method and tool. The applicability of the approach extends to a wide range of fields beyond the automotive industry. Many companies need assessments according to several standards and reference models whose separate consideration means extra costs. Xabier Larrucea and Izaskun Santamaria discuss multi-model approaches efficiently integrating different reference models and report about statistical data and conclusions derived from 47 industrial assessments. Antoni-Lluís Mesquida and Antonia Mas describe the results obtained and the lessons learned from the implementation of the ISO/IEC 29110 standard (Software engineering — Lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities) in four small software development companies clustered in a joint process improvement program. The paper by Efi Papatheocharous and Andreas S. Andreou provides an in-depth analysis of empirical evidence on the state of practice within the agile domain obtained through a survey focusing on agile software processes and teams, and particular topics of interest encompassing communication, project management, quality assurance, and validation. The editors would like to express their thanks to the members of the EuroSPI22013 Industrial Programme Committee for their contribution to the review and selection of the papers: Bachmann Volker, SIBAC GmbH, Germany; Bæk Jørgensen Jens, Mjølner Informatics A/S, Denmark; Breske Eva, Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany; Christiansen Mads, DELTA, Denmark; Daughtrey Taz, James Madison University, USA; Dekkers Carol, Quality Plus Technologies, USA; Dussa-Zieger Klaudia, Method Park Software AG, Germany; Ekert Damjan, ISCN GmbH, Austria; Fehrer Detlef, SICK AG, Germany; Fenz Andrea, Skills International GmbH, Austria; Forselius Pekka, 4SUM Partners, Finland; Georicke Stephan, iSQI GmbH, Germany; Hagenmeyer Philipp, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Germany; Hallikas Jarmo, Falcon Leader Oy, Finland; Hällmayer Frank, Software Factory GmbH, Germany; Hind Tim, AXA, UK; İbrişim Ayşegül, Turkish Standards Institution, Turkey; Johansen Jørn, DELTA Axiom, Denmark; Johansson Mika, FiSMA, Finland; König Frank, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Germany; Messnarz Richard, ISCN Ltd, Austria/Ireland; Morgenstern Jens, Germany; Nevalainen Risto, FiSMA, Finland; O'Leary Eugene, EQN Ltd., Ireland; Poth Alexander, SQS Software Quality Systems AG, Germany; Renault Samuel, Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor, Luxembourg; Romcea Cristina, Conti Temic microelectronic GmbH, Germany; Sauberer Gabriele, TermNet, Austria; Schweigert Tomas, SQS Software Quality Systems AG, Germany; Sechser Bernhard, Method Park, Germany; Spork Gunther, Magna Powertrain, Austria; Stefanova-Pavlova Maria, Center for Innovation and Technology Transfer-Global, Bulgaria; Von Bronk Peter, Systemberatung Software-Qualität, Germany; Wegner Thomas, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Germany. Some contributions published in this volume have been funded with support from the European Commission. In this case, the publications reflect the views only of the author(s), and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use, which may be made of the information contained therein. In addition to the EuroSPI research proceedings, a selection of the best industrial experience papers from the conference has been published in the Wiley ‘Journal of Software: Evolution and Process’ or its predecessors since 2004 1. The compilation for EuroSPI 2005 2 grew to gather a collection of 12 papers covering aspects that range from software standards to human factors and from software improvement to outsourcing. EuroSPI 2006 led to a collection of 10 papers under the umbrella of ‘European Industrial Experiences in Process Improvement and Innovation’ 3. In EuroSPI 2007, initiatives were presented and selected to be extended in a set of papers entitled ‘Process Improvement Lessons Learnt in Small and Large Organizations Worldwide’ 4. EuroSPI 2008 grew in the number of papers selected to reach a set of 11 papers edited under the name ‘SPI Experiences and Innovation for Global Software Development’ 5. ‘Topics in Software, Systems and Services Process Improvement’ 6 was the first of the collections published in the new ‘Journal of Software: Evolution and Process’. In this edition, hosted by Universidad de Alcala de Henares, Madrid, Spain, one of the main outputs presented by the EuroSPI initiative was the SPI manifesto. In a collection entitled ‘Industrial experiences with software process assessment and improvement’ 7, a set of seven papers was extended to be published in Volume 25 Issue 4 of the ‘Journal of Software: Evolution and Process’. EuroSPI 2011 took place in Roskilde, Denmark. ‘Application themes of software process assessment and improvement’ 8 gathers a set of nine papers covering aspects like Test SPICE, Nuclear SPICE, or Global Software Development. For 2011, in addition to the works published in ‘Journal of Software: Evolution and Process’, a new collection of papers was published in another of the key journals in the area: IET Software. Under the name ‘European Systems and Software Process Improvement and Innovation’ 9, six papers were extended to be included in the Volume 6, Issue 5 of this journal. The 2012 edition of the conference was held in Vienna. This compilation under the title ‘Software process improvement leveraged in various application domains’ 10 includes seven papers from the event. However, another special collection devoted to EuroSPI 2012 was issued in Elsevier's Computer Standards & Interfaces 36(1) under the generic name of ‘Systems, software and services process improvement’ and including set ofsix papers 11. In summary, in addition to the industrial and research proceedings, during the last 10 years, around a hundred papers have been published in top journals of the discipline. At EuroSPI 2013, the 20th anniversary of the conference was celebrated with an extra day of worldwide key notes sharing their thoughts about the next 20 years of SPI. This offers a set of leading ideas about how to continue with SPI in the future and how to even further support the innovation and improvement experiences in Europe and worldwide. From 2014 onwards, EuroSPI will use these ideas to further extend the EuroSPI scope. Also, from 2014 onwards, the European Certification and Qualification Association (ECQA) community joins EuroSPI conferences officially, and a memorandum of agreement was signed between Chinese delegations and ECQA, leading to Chinese participation from 2014. To celebrate the ongoing collaboration between EuroSPI and the Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, Wiley created in 2012 a Virtual Issue entitled ‘EuroSPI Collection’ bringing all previous EuroSPI Special Issues together in one collection. The special collection is introduced in the editorial ‘Empirical insights into process improvement: The EuroSPI papers’ 12 by Prof. Darren Dalcher, Editor-in-Chief of the journal who professionally nurtured the special issues from the beginning. The special collection is also the result of the dedication of Ms. Alice Wood, Wiley Senior Publishing Assistant. EuroSPI has an agreement with the ASQ (American Society of Quality, Software Division) to jointly issue an annual best paper award. It is planned that these best papers will be published in the Wiley journal. All this means that EuroSPI will continue growing, will be sustained for further years, and will develop more SPI stories, benefiting research and industry, to be published in collaboration with Wiley.

Software inspection is considered a cost-effective quality assurance technique in software process improvement. Although inspections detect the majority of defects in the early stages of the development process, this technique is not a common practice in the software industry, especially in small and medium enterprises. In this paper, we propose a model for the inspection process intended to be applicable and acceptable to both small and medium enterprises and large software organisations. The model was implemented in two organisations: one in a medium-scale company and the other one in a department of a big company where its feasibility and benefits were confirmed. A comparison with recent alternative inspection models has also been performed showing the practicality of the proposal and ease of adoption and cost-effectiveness. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ABSTRACT Business improvement is a hot topic in all business areas. In the last years, the unstoppable emergence of the use of social media by organizations and individuals alike has opened this tool for knowledge networking purposes. In this paper, the authors shed some light on how the traditional knowledge management approach has changed to a networked approach of knowledge sharing. Authors also explain how social media is used as a business tool, in particular in Information Technology industry environments. ECQA Certified Social Media Networker Skills (SIMS) is a new qualification that is available from 2013 and is meant to train and certify experts in the use of social media as a business improvement enabler and as a means for knowledge networking in organizational settings. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Given the importance of software in today's world, the development of software systems is a key activity that requires complex management scenarios. This article explores the implications of hard decisions in the context of software development projects (SDPs). More in deep, it focuses on the emotional consequences of making hard decisions in IT organisations. Complex SDPs involve a great variety of actors. This fact entails morale, feelings and emotions, which play an important role for communication, interaction and, ultimately, decision making. The aim of the article is twofold. First (Study 1), to identify which are the most important hard decisions in SDPS. Second (Study 2), to study the influence of emotions on decision-making processes (Study 2). Findings show the complex emotional consequences and difficulties that managers must face in hard decision-making processes.

Productivity is a key element in organizational management. Although it can be measured at different levels (country, sector, organization …) this research focuses on productivity at the job level. The aim of this paper is to obtain an overview of the state of the art in productivity measurement in software engineering, including the inputs and outputs of the production process used for this measurement at the job level in the workplace. To do so, a systematic literature review protocol was adapted from literature review protocol standards, and subsequently carried out. The objective is to assess the current inputs and outputs present in the literature in order to create new productivity measures for software practitioners. This paper reveals that two different measures are used to assess software engineering professionals: traditional SLOC/Time and planning projects units per time unit.

Fergal Mc Caffery and Valentine Casey describe how a lightweight assessment method was developed to educate Irish software development organisations in relation to becoming medical device software suppliers for the Medical Device (MD) and diagnostic industry.Anne Kramer presents an analysis of the new standard ISO 26262 for the automotive industry.She compares this standard to existing regulations of another safety-critical domain, that is, the medical device industry.She discusses the question 'Can we learn from each other?' to identify synergies between the automotive and the medical industry.

Dealing with user incidents, questions and problems are important tasks during the maintenance of the software. It is specially important for service providers, which must provide the users with a quick and reliable answer. Many times the incident has been previously solved for other users. In these cases, an appropriate knowledge management strategy could help to improve response times as well as the accuracy of such responses. This paper presents the work in progress of Co KIM, a knowledge based framework for incident management, based on the collaboration between users and experts. The framework is able to propose solutions for incidents based on the previous responses for other similar problems. The selection of the solutions is based on the previous responses from experts and the rating of experts, clients and responses.

The Internet and its increasing usage has changed informal learning in depth. This change has affected young and older adults in both the workplace and in higher education. But, in spite of this, formal and non-formal course-based approaches have not taken full advantage of these new informal learning scenarios and technologies. The Web 2.0 is a new way for people to communicate across the Internet. Communication is a means of transformation and knowledge exchange. These are the facts that cannot be obviated by the organisations in their training programmes and knowledge management. This special issue is devoted to investigating how informal learning changes or influences online information in Social Web and training strategies in institutions. In order to do so, five papers will present different approaches of informal learning in the workplace regarding Web 2.0 capabilities.

Cloud Computing is evolving from a mere “storage” technology to a new vehicle for Business Information Systems (BIS) to manage, organize and provide added-value strategies to current business models. However, the underlying infrastructure for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to become a new platform for trading partners and transactions must rely on intelligent, flexible, context-aware Multi-Tenant Architectures. In this paper, we present Cloudio, a Cloud Computing-based metadata-powered Multi-Tenant Architecture, backed with a proof-of-concept J2EE implementation.

There is a increasing need of defining standards at the beginning of any engineering project. The correct specification of standards has become essential in software development in order to handle correctly the development of projects. Nowadays the need to define standards at the outset of any engineering project is more evident than ever. The specification of standards has become an essential topic which universities try to teach to software engineering students. In fact, software creation processes are required intrinsically to be produced according to a systematic methodology to enable constant control during the project life cycle. This paper presents a new environment that enables semantic and social interaction of documentation produced during software development processes.