Miklos Biro

• Doctor Habilitatus
• Honorary Member at Software Competence Center Hagenberg

This special issue comprises a selected set of high‐quality and extended articles of the 28th Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement (EuroSPI) Conference, held in 2021 in Krems, Austria. Conferences were held in Dublin (Ireland) in 1994, in Vienna (Austria) in 1995, in Brighton (UK) in 1996, in Budapest (Hungary) in 1997, in Gothenburg...

This is a special issue in cooperation with EuroSPI (www.eurospi.net). EuroSPI represents a large international network of renowned experts and annual European conference series running successfully since its foundation in 1994. From 2013 onwards, an international functional safety and from 2016 onwards a functional safety and cybersecurity worksho...

Cyber‐Physical Systems (CPSs) differ from traditional Information Technology (IT) systems in such a way that they interact with the physical environment, i.e., they can monitor and manipulate real objects and processes. For this special issue, the authors of the best papers of IWCFS 2019 were invited to submit extended versions of their workshop pa...

This volume comprises a selected set of high‐quality and extended articles of the 26th Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement (EuroSPI) Conference, held during September 18–20, 2019 in Edinburgh, UK. Conferences were held in Dublin (Ireland) in 1994, in Vienna (Austria) in 1995, in Brighton (UK) in 1996, in Budapest (Hungary) in 1997, i...

The industry is currently undergoing tremendous changes. In the automotive domain vehicles get connected and autonomous, the powertrain gets electrified. The CO2 emissions have to be reduced as a contribution to stop the global warming. Intelligent service architectures for future e-mobility services are created, and accessibility requirements and...

This paper discusses the need and leveraging potential of formal modeling and web technology for progressing towards the goal of automating the establishment, maintenance and assessment of the completeness of traceability and the consistency of the requirements. The generic Augmented Lifecycle Space method, devised in an earlier paper, is applied a...

Cars of the future (ADAS – Autonomous self-driving assistant) will need to cover a number of new standards for mechatronic design and networking of the car in the cloud. This includes job roles for ISO 26262, IEC 61508 (functional safety), SAE J3061 (cybersecurity), etc. For instance, a car driving on a street will exchange information with neighbo...

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) offer many opportunities but pose many challenges—especially regarding functional safety, cybersecurity, and their interplay, as well as the systems’ impact on society. Consequently, new methods and techniques are needed for CPS development and assurance. The articles in this theme issue aim to help address some of the...

The assessment and improvement of the satisfaction of traceability requirements during the development of software in general and of safety-critical software in particular is demanding and costly. The special requirements are reflected in software process related general and industry specific standards and the popular agile approaches as well. It i...

Modern software development is unimaginable without the help of Application lifecycle management systems (ALMs) due to the heavy documentation and communication needs, especially in safety-critical developments. In this paper the idea of Augmented Lifecycle Space is presented together with its use and benefits. The main target of application is to...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Abstract State Machines, Alloy, B, TLA, VDM, and Z, ABZ 2016, held in Linz, Austria, in May 2016. The 17 full and 15 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. They record the latest research developments in sta...

Resource-efficient business processes are a key asset of an organization in a competitive market environment. Current efforts address this issue either at the process schema level by specifying an optimal sequence of process activities or at the process instance level by optimizing resource utilization within a single running process instance. In t...

Most existing software systems that lack explicit traceability links between artefacts, or if implemented, are often not leveraged to take advantage of the information it can provide to a development or validation team. Within the medical device domain, as in other safety critical domains, regulation normally requires such systems that are certifie...

The Special Issue of Journal of Software: Evolution and Process discusses papers on the process improvement approaches by The European System and Software Process Improvement and Innovation Initiative. The paper 'Identifying correlations of findings for building process improvement packages using graph clustering' by Choi, Kim, and Park is devoted...

Advanced medical devices exploit the advantages of embedded software whose development, due to their direct impact on human lives, is naturally subject to compliance with the stringent requirements of safety standards and regulations. This paper presents initial results and lessons learned from an ongoing project focusing on the development of a fo...

The use of embedded software is advancing in modern medical devices, so does its capabilities and complexity. This paradigm shift brings many challenges such as an increased rate of medical device failures due to software faults. In this letter, we present a rigorous 'correct by construction' approach for the trustworthy development of hemodialysis...

In order to define a modern approach for Software Process Improvement (SPI), the SPI Manifesto was developed, discussed, and finalized at the 16th EuroSPI Conference in 2009 in Alcala, Spain. The common understanding gained during the discussion and usage of the manifesto formed a nucleus from which the new ISO/IEC 33014[ISO01] was derived. In para...

Traceability of requirements through the software development lifecycle (including supporting processes such as risk management and change management) is a difficult and expensive task. The implementation of effective traceability allows organizations to leverage its many advantages, such as impact analysis, product verification and validation, and...

The paper discusses structure, quality and content of the currently available agile maturity models. It presents two approaches on how to deal with such models. As a first step of the analysis, the paper contains a compilation of maturity level naming used by these agile maturity models because the variety of level naming is a sign of the variety o...

Software Process Improvement (SPI) activities aim at driving change in information technology development towards increased quality and productivity levels. The SPI Manifesto describes the key values and principles for a successful implementation of SPI. About two-thirds of its principles relate to human, social, and organizational aspects and one-...

is available for this article.

The paper presents an update of the change of expectations and most recent new approaches regarding software processes and their improvement following the Software Process Improvement Hype Cycle introduced earlier by the author as an extension of the Gartner Hype Cycle idea. Software process assessment and improvement can itself be considered on th...

The paper describes the current status of agile maturity models. It shows where such models can be found and it contains a structured top level compilation of the currently available agile maturity models. In the second section, the paper describes an approach to analyse these agile maturity models, extracts their content, maps it to a reference m...

Looking back to the last 10 years of SPI, we can see a rapid change of focus from models to people. Models like CMMI, SPICE, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) or others still will remain useful. However, they do not have the power to create competitive advantage. What we see in all analysed approaches is that people really count....

Software plays a crucial role in the world today. Since 1994, the EuroSPI initiative presents and discusses results from systems, software and services process improvement and innovation (SPI) projects in industry and research, focusing on the gained benefits and the criteria for success. EuroSPI is a community that supported the founding of the SP...

Software process improvement (SPI) can be seen as a profession having its own competence needs and its own community of interest. European projects EQN and EU Cert have defined skill sets and a common certification scheme for about 20 professions, mainly in the IT domain. European Certification and Qualification Association ECQA is created to manag...

From the agile camp you can hear someone to say that CMMI is the big American waterfall model monster, and is outright contra productive to agile methods. From the CMMI camp you can hear someone to say that agile methods is hackers from hell that uses the agile paradigm to enjoy anarchy with no rules. You can also hear some say that agile works the...

Authors of this paper have been founders of the EuroSPI (1994 – now, www.eurospi.net ) network with the first networking of SPI strategies published at CON’93 conference. They were also founders of the idea and establishment of a Europe wide certification network ECQA ( www.ecqa.org ) in 2005 (strategy development 2005 – 2007, online systems set u...

In the past years, efforts in the field of Software Process Improvement were increasingly focusing on human aspects realizing that people participating in the processes have a high impact on the success of any improvement. While these aspects are included in newer models and methodologies, it is still vague how Software Process Improvement can be m...

This paper provides a historical perspective on the state of the field of software process improvement (SPI). Just as process improvement itself, the development of our expectations regarding process improvement can be viewed following a staged model which is analogous to the popular Gartner Hype Cycle for innovation. The stages highlighted in this...

One of the purposes of the Web4Groups Telematics Applications Project of 4. Framework is to provide, develop, and demonstrate new standardized group communication services for Euro-pean citizens. Voting and rating services are an important part of the tasks of Web4Groups. In this paper the generalization of the voting and rating architecture is pro...

With increasing process maturity of the software developing companies, an increasing interest in standardized processes can be observed. Company-specific standards are often derived from reference standards such as ISO-IEC 12207 or the German V-Modell ...

Many new product development (NPD) companies must nowadays work under turbulent conditions. The market competition is often fierce, while at the same time new and sometimes even disruptive technological uncertainties emerge. Speed and flexibility are ...

This paper summarizes multifaceted synergies discovered between the ISO/IEC 15408 (Common Criteria) IT Security Evaluation standard, software product quality evaluation standards and the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI ). In addition to serving research motivated interest, the usefulness of the synergies is demonstrated through case stu...

This paper summarizes multifaceted synergies discovered between the ISO/IEC 15408 (Common Criteria) IT Security Evaluation standard, software product quality evaluation standards and the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). In addition to serving research motivated interest, the usefulness of the synergies is demonstrated through case stud...

The new generation of general models that refer either to IT or Internal Controls, like COBIT or COSO, are presented with an executive management perspective. Practice shows that this opening is solely not enough to reach a breakthrough, since models became so complicated that they could only be applied with difficulties. The best catalysts of impr...

This paper identifies the forces affecting offshore software development based on a knowledge management perspective. The identified four major forces act along the dimensions of finance, individual education, organizational maturity, and culture. The analysis is validated on cases of European offshoring practice exhibited in the database of the Eu...

This paper discusses success criteria of distributed multinational EU projects based on trials performed at 59 organisations in 13 countries in the EU IST-2000-28162 project TEAMWORK. In this project the typical working processes, the teamwork structures in multinational distributed EU projects have been analysed and configured into e-working space...

The major source of environmental problems nowadays is the disregard of the laws of nature which escalates even more in the globalizing industrial society. It is a natural question whether we are not facing similar dangers in the more rapidly globalizing information society. What are the most important factors which characterise software or informa...

The PASS (Pay-roll Accounting and Settlement System) project is the first Central and Eastern European ESSI PIE (European Systems and Software Initiative Process Improvement Experiment) project directly supported by the European Commission. The PASS project was carried out under the ESSI initiative with the financial support of the Commission of th...

this paper a computational Reference Model of Distributed Group Decision Support Systems (RM-DGDSS) is presented within the framework of the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing [RM-ODP 92]. The RM-DGDSS defines a distributed architecture for supporting a group of decision makers connected via computer network. Reference model defines a v...

A computational Reference Model of Distributed Group Decision Support Systems (RM-DGDSS) is described. This Reference Model is a supplement of the standardized Reference Model of OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) and can be a candidate for standardization in ODP (Open Distributed Processing). The RM-DGDSS defines a distributed architecture environ...

In this paper, we discuss the meaningfulness of value added systems integration for distributed decision support from a market oriented primary perspective. The issues to be analysed are derived from all pairwise interrelationships of the entities involved in a decision situation. These are the task logic, the decision culture, and the decision env...

The development of decision support systems is motivated by socio-economic demand, and the opportunities offered by new hardware and software technologies. It goes without saying that these factors mutually stimulate each other as well. The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of the issues influencing the design of a prototype decision suppo...

The paper discusses the integration of currently commercially available techniques and supporting tools for constructing a specialized groupware application namely a distributed negotiation support system. It presents the different aspects of the integration methods and analyzes the actual design of a DIstributed NEgotiation Support Shell (DINE). T...

This paper is the first article in a series devoted to the study of the following general problem on vertex colorings of graphs. Suppose that some vertices of a graph G are assigned to some colors. Can this ‘precoloring’ be extended to a proper coloring of G with at most k colors (for some given k)? This question was motivated by practical problems...

In this paper we first review the current practice of operative aircraft and maintenance scheduling at the Hungarian Airlines. The ideas to be included in the proposed operative scheduling support system mean new contributions from both the algorithmic and human-computer interaction points of view. The algorithm is based on new graph theoretical re...

The paper discusses the integration of currently commercially available techniques and supporting tools for constructing a specialized groupware application namely a distributed negotiation support system. It presents the different aspects of the integration methods and analyzes the actual design of a DIstributed NEgotiation Support Shell (DINE). T...

One of the points of the paper is that the exploitation of deep knowledge may well contribute to the appreciation of technology supporting small groups. The term deep knowledge is used in this paper for knowledge that is not only derived from rules acquired from experts, but is complemented with the application of usually numerical algorithms which...

The purpose of this paper is the presentation of ideas exploiting the rapidly evolving possibilities offered by presentation hardware and software for interactive resource constrained scheduling. Mathematical difficulties inherent in the object-oriented representation and connections to two-dimensional bin-packing and graph theory are highlighted....

The transformation of bounded integer variables to binary ones has been considered as a solved problem for long. It is most of the time overlooked that the usual transformation is unacceptable in the case of the Knapsack problem. In this paper, all possible solutions to this problem are characterized. The characterization means that a newly defined...