Many of today's major products and services rely on software to deliver their core capabilities and value. Depending on the product and service, companies have to address a complex array of requirements, regulations and competitive forces. These factors imply different business models and different means for developing the software. Highly specified, formal processes and high assurance quality requirements drive Mission and safety critical projects. On the other end of the spectrum, managers and developers seek lightweight methods allowing for creativity and rapid development and customer value creation. Through the years, researchers have supported organizations by creating different development lifecycle models, maturity models, processes, best practices, testing approaches, development environments, and so forth. These have all had an impact on the engineering of software.

The International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) 2016 seeks papers in the many exciting areas of research going on in the domain of Software and Systems process. At the same time, the theme of this year's conference is on studying Process(es) in Action and recognizing that the AS-Planned and AS-Practiced processes can be quite different. As a result, meaningful research questions arise:

What context dependent modifications occurred on a project? Why are specific changes made and what were are the effects? How can agile development be adapted to mission-critical and complex software and systems development activities to accelerate development or improve quality? How can experience and knowledge from practice used to improve process design in those areas? How is data collected and how reliable is the data collected in improvement programs? Is required data available at all? And, finally, what are the implications for the software process?

ICSSP believes there is a strong need to bring practitioners and scientists together to discuss the role of the software process in current and future development of complex systems and in rapidly changing markets. To encourage these discussions and collaborative research, ICSSP announces the call for submissions to ICSSP 2016 - a proven forum for the exchange of research outcomes and industrial best practices in process development.