On behalf of the PROFES Organizing Committee we are proud to present the
proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Product-Focused Software
Process Improvement (PROFES 2011), held in Torre Canne, Italy. Since 1999
PROFES has grown in the software engineering community and has become a
premium conference that brings together both academia and industry.
The roots of PROFES lie in the professional software process improvement
motivated by product, process and service quality needs. The conference retains
its high quality and focus on the most relevant research issues by addressing
both perspectives, research and practice, from an academic and industrial point
of view.
Today’s software products and services are perceived as strategic assets for
empowering business sectors at every level of the value chain, from strategic to
operative. In this scenario, and considering the current global economic downturn,
the challenge for developing software products and services consists in
managing process diversity in order to reuse strategic software assets in various
fields and environments quickly and cost effectively. This was the special theme
for PROFES 2011.
In the last few years, many approaches and techniques have been proposed for
managing diversity: experience bases for collecting and sharing knowledge and
experiences; software development processes able to rearrange common assets in
diverse products; process patterns as an instrument for filling the gap between
process definition and the amount of customizations needed; estimation and
calibration techniques that deal with the different processes in use; parametric
and goal-oriented quality models; project management techniques able to fulfil
the project goals in spite of project characteristics; cloud computing and service
orientation for managing the diversity of hardware and software platforms. All
these innovations provide exciting opportunities to make significant progress in
understanding and facing real-world challenges.
This year’s technical program featured invited talks, research papers, and
experience reports on the most relevant topics in the focus area. We received
54 papers submitted from 22 nations, with each paper receiving at least three
reviews. After a thorough evaluation, the Program Committee selected 24 technical
full papers. The topics addressed in these papers indicate that the PROFES
theme is a vibrant research area, but is also of high interest for industry as
demonstrated by several papers that report on case studies or experience gained
in industry.