Modern systems consist of a complex mix of products and services—legacy, bespoke, COTS,open source, licensed, and user-developed—that must be designed to meet rapidly changingbusiness needs [9]. Business processes must be agile to capture and maintain customers withrapidly evolving needs, tastes, and desires. Systems technology and development methods must beresponsive to business needs to continuously support value creation. However, legacy and regulatoryconstraints, emerging requirements, enhanced interoperability, and the ascendancy of software havechallenged system development processes, and has made many companies deploying so-calledhybrid development approaches address these manifold constraints [14]. Just as systems are morenecessary for business success, the ability to align systems and business goals and processeshas become more difficult. In fact, in the field of software process development, deployment,and continuous improvement, we find a diversity of (competing) approaches, and we face afield that is still on the quest for the “optimal” approach to organize and improve software andsystem development [8]. In the past, the processes and underlying principles of business, systemengineering and software engineering have independently evolved and are represented by languagesand concepts that are tantalizingly similar and yet seem to be in conflict. This has led to confusionand often friction between and among these critical conceptual constituents [5].The volume at hand presents the special issue of theInternational Conference on Software andSystems Process(ICSSP) 2015, which was held in Tallinn, Estonia from August 24-26, 2015.ICSSP as the premier venue for research related to software and systems development processeshas become an important mediator for industry and academia. To answer questions like the onementioned before, ICSSP brings together scientists and practitioners to discuss problems andsolutions, and to present concrete experiences. Therefore, the six high-quality papers chosen forthis special issue address both a solid scientific background and an industry focus. It is throughpublishing such papers that we can bridge the industry-research gap, ensuring that our research willhave an impact, not only through our teaching and graduate programs but also by having a directeffect on the improvement of processes within industry.