The field of software engineering is characterized by speed and turbulence in many regards. While new ideas are proposed almost on a yearly basis, very few of them live for a decade or a longer. Lightweight software development methods were a new idea in the latter part of the 1990s. Now, ten years later, they are better known as agile software development methods, and an active community driven by practitioners has formed around the new way of thinking. Agile software development is currently being embraced by the research community as well. As a sign of increased research activity, most research-oriented conferences have an agile software development track included in the conference program. The XP conference series established in 2000 was the first conference dedicated to agile processes in software engineering. The idea of the conference is to offer a unique setting for advancing the state of the art in research and practice of agile processes. This year's conference was the tenth consecutive edition of this international event. Due to the diverse nature of different activities during the conference, XP is claimed to be more of an experience rather then a regular conference. It offers several different ways to interact and strives to create a truly collaborative environment where new ideas and exciting findings can be presented and shared. This is clearly visible from this year's program as well.

The theme of the 4th International Workshop on Learning Software Organizations (LSO 2002) was BalancingAgile Processes and Long-Term Learning in Software - ganizations. The LSOWorkshop series focuses on technical, organizational, and social solutions to problems of learning from past experiences and codifying the resulting best practicessotheycanbesystematicallyusedinsubsequentsoftwaredevelopmentefforts. Through paper presentations, panels, and discussions, the workshop explored the issues of managing knowledge in dynamic domains requiring signi?cant differences betweenorganizationsandbetweenprojects.Challengesdiscussedrangedfromrealistic assumptions on the added documentation burden LSO techniques may require to how effectively repositories have been used in the past to the team and social issues involved in applying solutions created by others. Experience-based approaches were discussed extensively and some reports of initial successes were given along with some instances where the experience base was underutilized. Enabling organizational learning involves more than repositories, search engines, and training. At its core, it involves creating new work practices that value current practices while searching for improvements. The issues involved are both technical and behavioral, aseffectivetechnologymayenticeutilization, butexperiencehasshownthat other factors weigh in just as heavily. There are currently no profound or ?nal answers on these questions, nor are they expected for some time to come, if at all. Hence the need for continued research into these dif?cult issues. This workshop, and others to follow hope to begin to shed light on the issues so an effective and fruitful dialog can begin that can lead to signi?cant contributions to the software engineering and knowledge management ?elds, amongst others."

XPAgileUniverse2003isthethirdconferenceinaseriesrunninginNorthA- rica and attracting participants from all over the world who are interested in the research, development and application of agile software processes. Agile app- aches value people and interaction over processes and tools - moving software engineering from the process-oriented software development approaches of the 1990s towards people-oriented approaches that we are starting to see more and more in this decade. Agile approaches stress a holistic view of software deve- pers as being involved in analysis, design, implementation and testing activities, while more traditional, tayloristic approaches separate these tasks and assign them to di?erent "resources. " Tayloristic approaches create knowledge-sharing problems as information gathered by one person needs to be handed over - usually in the form of documentation - to the next person in the chain. Agile approaches reduce the number of hand-o?s and, thus, decrease the amount of required documentation for knowledge sharing. While deemed a novelty only a few years ago, agile methods are now be- ming established in the software industry and are being applied in more and more application domains. While agile approaches move into the mainstream of software organizations, we are only now beginning to understand their bene?ts, areas of applicability, and also their dangers. This year's conference will increase this understanding and provide a better base for industry practitioners as they assess the e?ectiveness of agile methods in their environment.