Guest Editors' Introduction: End-User Software Engineering

Millions of people program to support their work but don't call themselves programmers. The field of end-user software engineering is concerned with helping these people create reliable, dependable, and reusable programs, without distracting them from their primary tasks. This special issue of IEEE Software presents a selection of research from this field, providing a glimpse of some of the exciting advances made in past 10 years of research and development.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Software Patterns

Patterns have become part of the software development mainstream. They're available for all phases of the development process, including analysis, documentation, design, testing, and configuration management, to name a few. In addition to documenting the current status of software patterns, this special issue will reflect critically on and discuss the achievements of the pattern community. This article is part of a special issue on software patterns.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Software Engineering Project Management 20 Years Later

A little more than 20 years ago, the guest editors assembled several papers on software engineering project management for the January 1984 edition of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Those papers portrayed the state of the practice in SEPM and looked into its future. They decided to revisit SEPM and assemble another set of articles that reflect how SEPM had advanced over the past 20 years and offer a fresh prediction of what lies ahead.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

Software is developed by people, used by people, and supports interaction among people. As such, human characteristics and cooperation are central to modern practical software construction. While human aspects were recognized as important over 30 years ago, recent changes in the software domain have made cooperative and human aspects of software engineering even more significant. This special issue of IEEE Software presents a sample of current research in this field illustrating the wide variety of approaches, software domains and activities in which human and cooperative aspects are being investigated.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Mining Software Archives

Modern programming environments automatically collect lots of data on software development, notably changes and defects. The field of mining software archives is concerned with the automated extraction, collection, and abstraction of information from this data. This is the introduction to a special issue of IEEE Software presenting a selection of the exciting research that is taking place in the field.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Realizing Service-Centric Software Systems

Service-centric software system is a multidisciplinary paradigm concerned with software systems that are constructed as compositions of autonomous services. These systems extend the service-oriented architecture paradigm by focusing on the design, development, and maintenance of software built under SOAs. In this special issue, we present five articles that tackle service-centric software systems.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Stakeholders in Requirements Engineering

The growing attention being paid to stakeholders' needs and desires reflects the growing importance of requirements engineering (RE) in software and systems development. This introduction reviews the RE process: identifying the stakeholders in a project, determining who and how important they are, prioritizing the identified stakeholder roles, and selecting representative individuals or groups from the identified and prioritized stakeholder roles with whom the development team can elicit and validate system requirements. The authors then mention each article in the issue in the context of today's latest thinking on RE. This article introduces a special issue on stakeholders in requirements engineering.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Software Testing Practices in Industry

Four papers and a roundtable discussion shed light on the current state of software testing practices. Case studies from industry experience address topics including unit-testing practices, agile testing, and automating software testing. Although many of these approaches show promise, software testing is still one of the more neglected practices within the software development life cycle. Suggestions for improvements in industry and academia are offered.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Embedded Software Technologies and Trends

Our world and society are shaped and governed by embedded systems. Examples of embedded systems include pacemakers, implanted biosensors, RFID tags, cell phones, home appliances, satellites, train control systems, and automotive components. In this special-issue introduction, we provide a snapshot of the topic of embedded software. We show its similarities to general-purpose IT and highlight embedded systems' peculiarities. In addition to highlighting trends and topics worth thinking about, we relate hands-on experiences from industry projects from which all of us can learn, independent of which type of software and domain we deal with in our day-to-day engineering work.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Building and Evaluating Ubiquitous System Software

From its inception, plenty of vision has existed in ubiquitous computing. This issue concentrates on how to realize the software infrastructure for that vision: on building and evaluating system software. Ubiquitous computing raises major challenges for system software researchers, mainly because of the heterogeneity and volatility that characterizes it. The set of participating users, hardware, and software in ubiquitous computing environments is highly dynamic and unpredictable. How far have we come in meeting the challenges?     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Global Software Development: How Far Have We Come?

Global software development efforts have increased in recent years, and such development seems to have become a business necessity for various reasons, including cost, availability of resources, and the need to locate development closer to customers. However, there's still much to learn about global software development before the discipline becomes mature. This special issue aims to assess the gap between the state of the art and the state of the practice. It presents five articles that cover various aspects of global software development, including knowledge management strategies, distributed software development, requirements engineering, distributed requirements, and managing offshore collaboration. A Point/Counterpoint department discusses whether global software development is indeed a business necessity.This article is part of a special issue on Global Software Development.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Developing Scientific Software, Part 2

This guest editors' introduction introduces a special issue on scientific software development. This issue is a sequel to the July/August 2008 issue, whose 6 articles provided some flavor of the variety of such software. Part 2 of this theme focuses on practices for improving the relationships between users, developers, and software.