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The volume at hand presents the special issue of the 12th International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) 2019, which was held in Montreal, Canada, from May 25 to 26, 2019. ICSSP 2019 is the latest in a series of conferences that have been organized by the International Software and Systems Process Association. In our evolving landscape, many companies are making efforts to move towards new technologies and tools, agile principles, and continuous integration and delivery. In doing so, they find opportunity, flexibility, and strength in evolving towards hybrid processes, which are neither purely traditional nor can count as textbook agile. This special issue focuses on hybrid processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software modelling and model-driven engineering (MDE) is traditionally studied from a technical perspective. However, one of the core motivations behind the use of software models is inherently human-centred. Models aim to enable practitioners to communicate about software designs, make software understandable, or make software easier to write through domain-specific modelling languages. Several recent studies challenge the idea that these aims can always be reached and indicate that human factors play a role in the success of MDE. However, there is an under-representation of research focusing on human factors in modelling. During a GI-Dagstuhl seminar, topics related to human factors in modelling were discussed by 26 expert participants from research and industry. In breakout groups, five topics were covered in depth, namely modelling human aspects, factors of modeller experience, diversity and inclusion in MDE, collaboration and MDE, and teaching human-aware MDE. We summarise our insights gained during the discussions on the five topics. We formulate research goals, questions, and propositions that support directing future initiatives towards an MDE community that is aware of and supportive of human factors and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing flexibility in industry leads to an ecosystem of change, affecting the balance of processes and technology as well as the developers who have to cope with the change. Furthermore, the change itself might impact the ability to use quantitative methods to learn from previous experience. The goal of this study is to better understand the ecosystem of mutual impacts and changes of process and technologies as well as how developers perceive a technology setting and deal with its change. Therefore, we conducted a case study at Ericsson, performing a series of interviews among 6 employees (senior developers and architects). We identified a time line of changes that happened over 7 years. A set of observations about the relation between processes and tooling, and observations about developer's perceptions of the technology settings, and their strategy to deal with these changing technology settings. We discuss how the observed change impacts the ability to perform quantitative evaluations of technology and processes. The findings show that a bad choice of technologies can lead to unexpected impact on team dynamics. Furthermore, change happens so regular that it needs to be considered when collecting data for a quantitative evaluation of, eg, productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In model-driven engineering (MDE), a particular MDE setting of employed languages and automated and manual activities has major impact on productivity. Furthermore, it has been observed that such MDE settings evolve over time. However, currently not much is known about this evolution and its impact on the MDE setting's maturity, i.e., on changeability and other productivity dimensions. Research so far focuses on evolution of separate building blocks, such as (modeling-) languages, tools, or transformation, only. In this article, we address the lack of knowledge about evolution of MDE settings by investigating case studies from different companies. The first results reveal (1) that there is evolution that affects the composition of an MDE setting ( structural evolution) and has the potential to strongly impact aspects, such as changeability and (2) that this structural evolution actually occurs in practice. Based on these first results, we investigated (3) whether there are cases in practice, where structural evolution already altered the risks of changeability given by the respective MDE setting. Therefore, we search and identify examples for such evolution steps on MDE settings from practice and collected six case studies on evolution histories in detail. As a result, we show in this paper that structural evolution (a) is not seldom in practice and (b) sometimes leads to the introduction of changeability risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: Measurement programs are subject to changing requirements, causing the need for a robustness to compensate these changes. Existing methods enable the assessment of measurement programs and their robustness with the help of company representatives. Goal: However, it is not clear how much the spread of knowledge among roles and differences between company internal organizations influence the result and quality of the assessment. Thus, it is not known today who and how many representatives should be interviewed to get reliable results. Method: To address these points we performed a case study on the assessment method MeSRAM, spanning 18 interviews with 14 representatives of 4 different organizations within a large international communication company. Results: Managers are able to answer more questions and their answers are more often correct than those of engineers. Furthermore, most errors occur for questions about the use of concrete metrics, while for aspects about the metrics' infrastructure no conflicting answers occurred. We also identified 6 reasons for gaining incorrect answers. Conclusion: The assessment of measurement programs requires additional care to ensure the quality of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evolution of metamodels can be represented at the finest grain by the trace of atomic changes such as add, delete, and update of elements. For many applications, like automatic correction of models when the metamodel evolves, a higher grained trace must be inferred, composed of complex changes, each one aggregating several atomic changes. Complex change detection is a challenging task since multiple sequences of atomic changes may define a single user intention and complex changes may overlap over the atomic change trace. In this paper, we propose a detection engine of complex changes that simultaneously addresses these two challenges of variability and overlap. We introduce three ranking heuristics to help users to decide which overlapping complex changes are likely to be correct. In our approach, we record the trace of atomic changes rather than computing them with the difference between the original and evolved metamodel. Thus, we have a complete and an ordered sequence of atomic changes without hidden changes. Furthermore, we consider the issue of undo operations (i.e. change canceling actions) while recording the sequence of atomic changes, and we illustrate how we cope with it. We validate our approach on 8 real case studies demonstrating its feasibility and its applicability. We observe that a full recall is always reached in all case studies and an average precision of 70.75%. The precision is improved by the heuristics up to 91% and 100% in some cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decades, process verification has been intensively addressed and has become an essential activity to correct and to remove errors before process execution. Typical process verification ecosystems propose to express properties to be verified on the process. A property expresses a desired behavior that must hold or not in the process execution. Processes during their lifespan are continuously adapted for several purposes: enriching, correcting, and refactoring the process. When a process is adapted, the existing properties must naturally be rechecked to ensure that no errors have been introduced, ie, the properties still hold. However, the properties may become outdated and must be coadapted w.r.t. the adapted process before to be rechecked. Otherwise, the verification may raise false alarms or may not detect newly introduced errors. In this paper, we propose a coadaptation approach of properties while considering process adaptation for the different dimensions, namely, control flow, object flow, resources, and timing. We systematically studied process changes in the multiple dimensions to identify those that do impact properties and for which we propose resolution strategies. Our preliminary evaluation shows that our resolutions strategies allow to support users in correctly coadapting impacted properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blended modeling aims to improve the user experience of modeling activities by prioritizing the seamless interaction with models through multiple notations over the consistency of the models. Inconsistency tolerance, thus, becomes an important aspect in such settings. To understand the potential of current commercial and open-source modeling tools to support blended modeling, we have designed and carried out a systematic study. We identify challenges and opportunities in the tooling aspect of blended modeling. Specifically, we investigate the user-facing and implementation-related characteristics of existing modeling tools that already support multiple types of notations and map their support for other blended aspects, such as inconsistency tolerance, and elevated user experience. For the sake of completeness, we have conducted a multivocal study, encompassing an academic review, and grey literature review. We have reviewed nearly 5000 academic papers and nearly 1500 entries of grey literature. We have identified 133 candidate tools, and eventually selected 26 of them to represent the current spectrum of modeling tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP) provides a leading forum for the exchange of research outcomes and industrial best practices in process development from software and systems disciplines. ICSSP 2018 was held in Gothenburg, Sweden, May 26 to 27, 2018, colocated with the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). The theme of ICSSP 2018 was studying "Demands on Processes, Processes on Demand" by recognizing the demands on processes that include the need for both well‐developed plans and incremental deliveries (agile and hybrid processes), utilization of increased automation (model‐based engineering and DevOps), higher degrees of customer collaboration, comprehensive analysis of existing products for reuse (open source and COTS), and performance requirements of enterprise‐level architectures. This special issue includes the revised and extended versions of the five highest ranked full research papers and industry experience papers of ICSSP 2018, including the two award‐winning papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]