Software Process Alfonso Fuggetta Politecnico di Milano and CEFRIEL Via Fucini, 2 20133 Milano - Italy alfonso.fuggetta@polimi.it Elisabetta Di Nitto Politecnico di Milano Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32 20133 Milano - Italy elisabetta.dinitto@polimi.it ABSTRACT This paper is a travelogue of Software Process research and practice in the past 15 years. It is based on the paper writ- ten by one of the authors for the FOSE Track at ICSE 2000. Since then, the landscape of Software Process research has significantly evolved: technological breakthroughs and mar- ket disruptions have defined new and complex challenges for Software Engineering researchers and practitioners. In this paper we provide an overview of the current sta- tus of research and practice, highlight new challenges, and provide a non-exhaustive list of research issues that, in our view, need to be tackled by future research work. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.9 [Software Engineering]: Management—software process models, life cycle, programming teams General Terms Management, Performance, Human Factors. Keywords Software Process, Software Development, Agile Software De- velopment, Software Development Environments, Social Fac- tors in Software Development, Empirical Studies. 1. INTRODUCTION Year after year, software has become an increasingly es- sential and vital constituent of our society. There is no busi- ness sector or aspect of our daily life that is not affected by software. Personal and work activities, business and eco- nomic initiatives, civil and industrial infrastructures, poli- tics, education, and entertainment – just to name a few – are all deeply permeated and governed by software applications and systems. Consequently, software de- velopment has become a critical activity that needs to be carefully studied, understood, improved, and supported. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. FOSE ’14, May 31 â ˘ A¸ S June 7, 2014, Hyderabad, India Copyright 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-2865-4/14/05 ...$15.00. Over the past half of a century, the goal of the Software Engineering community has been to study and tackle these issues and problems. Within this community, Software Process research has focused on understanding, describ- ing, evaluating, automating, and improving the procedures, policies, and techniques used to master this complex en- deavor. This research work has produced many interesting results. At the same time, however, many goals and objec- tives have been ill-framed or overemphasized, while others have been overlooked. Certainly, many problems are still in search of convincing approaches able to thoroughly address and tackle them. The term Software Process gained major visibility in the eighties and since then has sparked a lot of projects and ini- tiatives in different areas: modeling, automation, improve- ment to name a few. At ICSE 2000, one of the authors wrote a paper about the achievements, mistakes, and open chal- lenges of this research area [18]. The paper was presented in the FOSE (Future of Software Engineering) Track. Since then, a lot has happened. The Internet has redefined all as- pects of our society. Mobile devices have radically changed the way citizens and companies approach Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Totally new sectors and markets have been created from scratch (e.g., social networks). Existing approaches to software development and software distribution have been completely transformed by the advent and wide diffusion of concepts such as open source software development, agile methods, and develop- ment platforms for mobile applications. Consequently, it does make sense to reconsider the state of the Software Pro- cess research community, to critically revise the way it has dealt with the issues and opportunities identified in year 2000 and, at the same time, to discuss how it is coping with the new challenges and deep transformations that have oc- curred over the past 15 years. This paper has the ambition to discuss these issues and to provide some contributions for the evolution and strategic development of the community. To pursue this goal, the paper is organized as follows: • Section 2 summarizes the main comments proposed in the FOSE 2000 Paper. • Section 3 provides a quick overview of the main trends and directions in software process research over the past decade. • Section 4 highlights some key challenges and needs emerging from industries, practitioners, and the mar- ket in general. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. FOSE’14, May 31 – June 7, 2014, Hyderabad, India Copyright 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-2865-4/14/05...$15.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2593882.2593883 1