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Software developers are under ever-increasing pressure to deliver their products more quickly and with higher levels of quality. These demands are set in a dynamic context of frequently changing technologies, limited resources and globally distributed development teams. At the same time, global competition is forcing organizations that develop software to cut costs by rationalizing processes, outsourcing part or all of their activities, reusing existing software in new or modified applications and evolving existing systems to meet new needs, whilst still minimizing the risk of projects failing to deliver.

To address these difficulties, new or modified processes are emerging, including agile methods and plan-based product line development. Open Source, COTS and community-developed software are becoming more popular. Outsourcing coupled with 24/7 development demand well-defined processes and interfaces to support the co-ordination of organizationally- and geographically-separated teams.

All of these challenges combine to increase demands on software processes. A number of practical questions arise, such as:

What defines a process-based competitive advantage?
What is the interface between software process and business process?
How do changes in process need to be reflected and supported in the organization?
What is the return on investment for CMMI, 6 Sigma, Spice, ISO and other process improvement paradigms and industry standards?
How can we predict the effects of process improvement initiatives?
What are the implications of adopting systems engineering processes?

How can more precise microprocess capabilities be better integrated with more strategic macroprocess capabilities?
How can process representation and analysis capabilities better support expression and reasoning about unavoidably incomplete, inconsistent, ambiguous, or emergent process definitions?
How can software processes and associated methods, tools, and metrics be better integrated with each other, and with their counterparts in business processes and hardware/software/humanware systems engineering, development, and evolution processes?
How can software processes be better supported by and linked to underlying theories of successful software development?
How can various forms of simulation and modeling methods and tools be better integrated with each other and with other processrepresentations and reasoning tools?
How can useful process assets (including process models and process simulations) be safely composed and organized into useful asset libraries?

Process modeling and simulation of emergent issues and processes (such as global software development, software/systems acquisition, open source development, software safety and security, etc.)
Advances in software process simulation modeling representations and methods, yielding generalized and adaptable process simulation models featuring "plug and play" process model components, patterns or archetypes
Applications of software process modeling and simulation approaches in industry

For the first time, in 2006 two successful series of conferences are combining efforts to address these and other related questions. Previous Software Process Workshops have provided a high-quality forum for assessing current and emerging software process capabilities, and for obtaining insights into worthwhile directions in software process research. ProSim is the leading event for the simulation and modeling of software processes. The combined event will be co-located with ICSE 2006 in Shanghai, China, immediately prior to ICSE2006 .