In this issue

In this issue, we have six regular research papers which are all concerned with aspects of software development and software quality. Global software development has become an integral part of the software industry over recent years, but such development is not without problems. In ‘‘Handover of managerial responsibilities in global software development: a case study of source code evolution and quality’’, Ronald Jabangwe, Jürgen Börstler, and Kai Petersen discuss the quality of two products that were developed using global software development. They discovered that software project management responsibilities can be passed between two geographically dispersed sites without a negative impact on quality. They also found that development work can be carried out using such dispersed sites without adversely affecting quality. These results are important because it had previously been thought that distributing software development around the world may have a detrimental effect on quality. Continuing with the global software development theme, the paper ‘‘An experiencebased framework for evaluating alignment of software quality goals’’ by Panagiota Chatzipetrou, Lefteris Angelis, Sebastian Barney, and Claes Wohlin considers the agreement between stakeholders when prioritizing goals for a project. The authors propose a framework of techniques to study prioritization alignment and then apply this framework to an empirical study of global software development. Another relatively new concept in the field of information and communication technology is that of cloud computing. In ‘‘A framework and tool to manage Cloud Computing service quality’’, Francisco Jose Dominguez-Mayo, Julian Alberto Garcia-Garcia, Maria Jose Escalona, Manuel Mejias, Matias Urbieta, and Gustavo Rossi describe a capability maturity model for offshore outsourcing services. The model can be used to assess capability models and standards in the cloud as well as software processes and products.