Addressing evolving requirements faced by the software industry

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 (Austria) in 2012, Dundalk (Ireland) in 2013, in Luxembourg in 2014, in Ankara (Turkey) 2015, in Graz (Austria) 2016, in Ostrava (Czech Republic) 2017, and in Bilboa (Spain) in 2018. EuroSPI has a cooperation with the EU Blueprint for Automotive project DRIVES (2018-2021) where leading Automotive industry discusses and presents skills for the Europe 2030 strategy in the automotive sector. EuroSPI has established the SPI Manifesto (SPI = Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement), 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, and Agile) 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. From the set of papers presented at EuroSPI 2018 in Bilbao, Spain, six papers were selected by editors to be expanded in this special issue based on their contribution, novelty, and soundness. In the following paragraphs, editors introduce the set of papers discussing their contents and linkage with relevant literature. The paper “Health, Safety and Wellbeing through Ethical Behaviours in Computer and Information Systems Development and Deployment” by Rahanu, Georgiadou, Siakas, and Ross deals with the application of an ethical framework to identify and defend ethical stances related to health and safety in the development of new software systems. This framework is aimed to raise the visibility of ethical aspects for providers, project managers, developers, engineers, and customers alike. Although codes of ethics have been adopted by professional societies way back,1 professional software engineering is needed of an updated code of ethics.2 Not in vain, recently ethics has been identified as a software design concern.3 As a result of this, there are calls for ethics-aware software engineering4 and even specific code of ethics5 for green issues in green software engineering. The paper presented in the special issue is contributing to the trend by including aspects like health and wellbeing. In “Validating Effectiveness of Safety Requirement' Compliance Evaluation in Process Assessments” by Timo Varkoi, Timo Mäkinen, Frank Cameron, and Risto Nevalainen, authors present an effort to determine how accurate is the Nuclear SPICE assessment method with regards to compliance evaluation in software scenarios. Authors underline that Nuclear SPICE assessment is useful when domain specific requirements must be fulfilled. Process assessments are one of the pillars for the Journal of Software: Evolution and Process6, 7 as well as its predecessors8 and EuroSPI9-11 along with a set of different journals in the field.12-14 This paper is a clear continuation of a set of efforts on the topic but also a good path towards future developments in the field on the combination of compliance management. “A Mechanism to Explore Proactive Knowledge Retention in Open Source Software Communities” is authored by Rashid, Clarke, and O'Connor. Knowledge management and knowledge retention is a classic topic in software organizations15-18 and its connection with Open Source Software is very promising. In this paper, authors present a method towards the formation of proactive knowledge retention practices in Open Source Software projects to transform contributor's use of knowledge and engagement into knowledge relevant activities like knowledge sharing and transfer. Barbara Gallina is the author of the paper entitled “Quantitative Evaluation of Tailoring within SPICE-compliant Security-informed Safety-oriented Process Lines.” Being SPICE, its connected standard ISO/IEC 15504 and the revision ISO/IEC 33001:2015 is one of the cornerstones of the EuroSPI community, the topic is pervasive in the literature connected to the community.19-21 In the case presented in the paper, the author proposes the integration of SPICE with Security-informed Safety-oriented Process Line Engineering (SiSoPLE) along with the Goal/Question/Metric (GQM) paradigm. Results show the applicability of the extended model and its usefulness in the context of critical-systems engineering. In the paper “Managing Security Debt across PLC phases in a VSE context” Xabier Larrucea, Izaskun Santamaría and Borja Fernández-Gauna present an approach towards the integration of safety and security aspects within the life cycle along with a framework for managing security, safety, and its associated security technical debt for Very Small Entities. These organizations are the focus of the ISO/IEC 29110 standard, one of the research avenues explored by researchers in the last years.22-24 In the case presented in this paper, authors extend the proposal of the standard to manage Security Debt in the context of Very Small Entities. The final paper is “DRIVES – EU Blueprint Project for the Automotive Sector – A Literature Review of Drivers of Change in Automotive Industry” and is authored by Jakub Stolfa, Svatopluk Stolfa, Christian Baio, Utimia Madaleno, Petr Dolejsi, Federico Brugnoli, and Richard Messnarz. DRIVES (2018-2021) is a European project aimed at developing human capital in the automotive supply chain, including software practitioners. In this work, authors present the results of a stakeholder analysis performed in DRIVES, which will be used for the further development of skills and training portfolio for the European Automotive industry in the following 2 years of the project. Prof. Rory O'Connor was scientific program chair of the EuroSPI initiative from 2008 to 2019. He passed away unexpectedly in July 2019. The EuroSPI community is very grateful for his contribution and service over these many years. In this special issue, a paper he co-authored was selected to be part of the collection by 2019. We will miss the contributor, the colleague, and the friend we had in Rory. May he rest in peace. 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.