Product-Focused Software Process Improvement

On behalf of the PROFES Organizing Committee, we are proud to present the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2021). Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the conference was held in a hybrid format on November 26, 2021. Since 1999, PROFES has established itself as one of the top recognized international process improvement conferences. In the spirit of the PROFES conference series, the main theme of PROFES 2021 was professional software process improvement (SPI) motivated by product, process, and service quality needs. PROFES 2021 is a premier forum for practitioners, researchers, and educators to present and discuss experiences, ideas, innovations, as well as concerns related to professional software development and process improvement driven by product and service quality needs. PROFES especially welcomes contributions emerging from applied research to foster industry-academia collaborations of leading industries and research institutions. The technical program of PROFES 2021 was selected by a committee of leading experts in software process improvement, software process modelling and empirical software engineering. Two Program Committees were formed from qualified professionals: one for the full and short tracks and one for the industrial track. This year, 36 full research papers were submitted. After a thorough evaluation that involved at least three independent experts per paper, 14 full technical papers were finally selected (39% acceptance rate). In addition, we had 5 industry paper submissions, 3 of which we accepted for the final program. Furthermore, we received 7 short paper submissions, of which 3 were accepted. Each submission was reviewed by at least three members from the PROFES Program Committees. Based on the reviews and overall assessments, the program chairs took the final decision on acceptance. The technical program consisted of the following sessions: Agile and Migration, Requirements, Human Factors, and Software Quality. Continuing the open science policy adopted since PROFES 2017, we encouraged and supported all authors of accepted submissions to make their papers and research publicly available. We are thankful for the opportunity to have served as chairs for this conference. The Program Committee members and reviewers provided excellent support in the papers. We are also grateful to all authors of submitted manuscripts, presenters, keynote speakers and session chairs, for their time and effort in making PROFES 2021 a success. We would also like to thank the PROFES Steering Committee members for their guidance and support in the organization process.