This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement, PROFES 2013, held in Paphos, Cyprus, in June 2013. The 22 revised full papers presented together with 10 short papers and 2 tutorial papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on empirical software engineering, software process improvement, managing software processes, software measurement, decision support in software engineering, safety-critical software engineering, and software maintenance.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12 International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement, PROFES 2011, held in Torre Canne, Italy, in June 2011. The 24 revised full papers presented together with the abstracts of 2 keynote addresses were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on agile and lean practices, cross-model quality improvement, global and competitive software development, managing diversity, product and process measurements, product-focused software process improvement, requirement process improvement, and software process improvement.

On behalf of the PROFES Organizing Committee we are proud to present the proce- th ings of the 10 International Conference on Product Focused Software Process - provement (PROFES 2009), held in Oulu, Finland. Since the first conference in 1999, the conference has established its place in the software engineering community as a respected conference that brings together participants from academia and industry. The roots of PROFES are in professional software process improvement motivated by product and service quality needs. The conference addresses both the solutions found in practice as well as relevant research results from academia. To ensure that PROFES retains its high quality and focus on the most relevant research issues, the conference has actively maintained close collaboration with industry and sub- quently widened its scope to the research areas of collaborative and agile software development. A special focus for 2009 was placed on software business to bridge research and practice in the economics of software engineering. This enabled us to cover software development in a more comprehensive manner and tackle one of the most important current challenges identified by the software industry and software research community - namely, the shift of focus from "products" to "services. " The current global economic downturn emphasizes the need for new methods and so- tions for fast and business-oriented development of products and services in a gl- ally distributed environment.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Product Fucused Software Process Improvement, PROFES 2002, held in Rovaniemi, Finland in December 2002. The 48 revised papers presented together with 2 keynote contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on improvement management, process modeling, software quality, Agile software development, process improvement approaches, methods and techniques, embedded software process improvement, process improvement case studies, effective use of measurements, wireless services, use cases, knowledge management, embedded systems methods, COTS quality techniques, frameworks, mobile solutions, and methods and techniques.

The 2nd International Conference on Product Focused Software Process - provement(PROFES2000)continuedthesuccessofthePROFES'99conference. It was organized in Oulu, Finland, June 20-22, 2000. The PROFES conference has its roots in the PROFES Esprit project (http: //www.ele.vtt.?/profes/), but by 1999 it had already evolved into a full-?edged general purpose conference gaining wide-spread international popularity. ThemainthemeofPROFES2000wasprofessionalsoftwareprocessimpro- ment (SPI) motivated by product and service quality needs. SPI is facilitated by softwareprocessassessment, softwaremeasurement, processmodeling, andte- nology transfer and has become a practical tool for quality software engineering and management. The conference addresses both the solutions found in practice aswellasrelevantresearchresultsfromacademia.Thepurposeoftheconference is to bring into the light the most recent ?ndings and results of the area and to stimulate discussion between the researchers, experienced professionals, and technology providers for SPI. WiththetremendousgrowthofInternetandtelecommunicationapplications, it is ever more important to emphasize the quality in softwareproducts and p- cesses.With plenty of new people andnew software-basedapplications emerging at a very fast pace, it is easy to forget the importance of product and process improvement, and to repeat the same mistakesalreadymade in moretraditional software development. The PROFES conference has addressed this issue by - plicitly enhancing the conferencetopicstowardsInternetandtelecommunication applications. Another important addition is the Learning Software Organizations (LSO2000) workshop, which was organized in conjunction with PROFES 2000. TheLSOworkshopseriesisacommunicationforumthataddressesthe questions of organizational learning from a software point of view and builds upon exi- ing work on knowledge management and organizational learning. LSO comp- mented the PROFES program encouraging fruitful discussions and information exchange between the participants of PROFES 2000 and LSO 2000.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement, PROFES 2015, held in Bolzano, Italy, in December 2015. The 18 revised full papers presented together with 10 short papers and 18 workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on lessons learned from industry-research collaborations; instruments to improve the software development process; requirements, features, and release management; practices of modern development processes; human factors in modern software development; effort and size estimation validated by professionals; empirical generalization; software reliability and testing in industry; workshop on processes, methods and tools for engineering embedded systems; workshop on human factors in software development processes; and workshop on software startups: state of the art and state of the practice.