Editor's Meesage to Special Issue on Software Engineering

Software engineering is a research area that covers theories and technologies of various aspects of software lifecycle including development and maintenance. In recent years, requirements to software quality and productivity are being changed in response to rapid chanages in IT environment as social infrastructure. Software engineering research has to find and solve current and prospective problems on practical software developments. Toward this situation, wide-ranging scientific and/or engineering approaches are needed, which includes new principles of software engineering based on theoretical researches and demonstrational experiments based on empirical researches in addition to long succession of universal fundamental theoretical researches. Futhermore, it is significantly important to integrate the multiple approaches and to find reliable and practical solutions. Because of this background, IPSJ Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSE), holds many events (e.g.: symposiums, workshops, research meetings), and calls on many software engineering researchers and software engineers to join the events, in order to share wide-ranging knolwedge including theoretical research results and experiences of practice among researchers, engineers, and practitioners. This special issue is also designed as a part of these activities. This special issue invited new research results and experiences about all aspects of software engineering. In addition, the editorial committee promoted submissions of papers to both this special issue and Software Engineering Symposium (SES) 2015, sponsored by SIGSE, in order to accelerate submissions of excellent papers and to drive contributions to society. This collaboration with SES is continuing from 2011. The editorial committee accepted 4 papers out of 22 papers submitted to this special issue through peer review meetings. The editorial committee made a lot of efforts to clearify the acceptance conditions for the conditionally accepted papers at the first peer review meeting, and to make review reports useful for revising papers that were not accepted. The accepted papers cover topics about requirements specification, code analysis, programming, and project management. Lastly, I would like to thank all the authors of the papers for their submissions to this special issue, the editorial committee of Journal of Information Processing for admitting this special issue, and all the reviewers and the editorial committees of this special issue for their invaluable contributions to the review process.