Software process improvement in Europe: selected articles from EuroSPI 2004

It is a pleasure to introduce this special issue of Software Process Improvement and Practice with selected articles from the research track of the European Software Process Improvement Conference (EuroSPI), 2004 (Dingsøyr 2004). In 2004, the conference was in its 11th year, and had become the main meeting place in Europe between the software industry and academia to discuss software process improvement (SPI). The success of SPI is influenced by organizational issues as well as technology (Dybå 2005). The conference dealt with SPI in a broad sense, investigating organizational issues as well as methods and tools for SPI. The first year when EuroSPI had a separate research track was 2004. The goal of this track was to present innovative and significant research articles in SPI, relevant to the software industry. Another goal was to make articles readable for a scientific and industrial audience, and that claims in articles should be supported with appropriately described evidence or references to relevant literature.