The 25th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES) took place in Tartu from December 2–4, 2024. The conference brought more than 50 internationally renowned researchers and industry practitioners to Tartu, for interesting talks and discussions. Most participants came from Europe, mainly from Austria, Finland, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden, but there were also participants from Japan and the USA.
PROFES is among the top recognised international software development and process improvement conferences. The PROFES conference series aims to provide a premier forum for practitioners, researchers, and educators to present and discuss experiences, ideas, innovations, and concerns related to professional software process improvement motivated by product and service quality needs.
PROFES conferences encourage the exchange of ideas that help explore, understand, and model phenomena in software engineering from the point of view of process-product relationships. Traditionally, PROFES provides topics, which are up-to-date, important, and interesting to both practitioners and researchers.
This year, the conference was organised by the University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science.
The pre-conference programme took place on December 2 in the Delta Study Building, starting with the co-located Third Workshop on Engineering Processes and Practices for Quantum Software (PPQS’24) in the morning and continuing with the Doctoral Symposium in the afternoon. The Doctoral Symposium was chaired by Anne Hess, Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt, and Andreas Jedlitschka, Fraunhofer IESE, both from Germany. The Doctoral Symposium was well attended by 15-20 PhD students and several supervisors. The mix of presentations, discussions, and a closing stand-up panel where students had the opportunity to ask questions to experienced supervisors was highly appreciated by the PhD students.
The first day of the conference ended with a guided tour through the UT Art Museum and the historic main building of the University of Tartu, as well as a reception in the nearby Ülikooli kohvik.
The main conference took place in the UT library on December 3–4. After the Opening Session, Janne Järvinen from Business Finland gave a keynote titled “Trends in Digitalization and Related Future Research Needs”. Janne reported on the Business Finland’s thematic strategy and the special role that digitalisation plays in it.
The scientific programme on the first day of the main conference was structured into six sessions in two parallel tracks, covering the following topics:
- Agile Practices and Continuous Engineering
- Human Factors in Software Engineering
- AI-Driven Approaches for Requirements Engineering
- Micro-Services and Cloud Migration
- AI for Software Engineering in Practice (I)
- Technical Debt
The day closed with a dinner at Vilde ja Vine and the presentation of two “Best Paper” awards and one “Test of Time” award.
The second day of the main conference started with a keynote talk given by Silverio Martínez-Fernández of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech on the topic “Environmental sustainability of machine learning systems: reducing the carbon impact of their lifecycle process”. The focus of this talk lay on the reduction of the carbon footprint along the complete Machine Learning life-cycle, from Data Management, Modeling, Development, to Operations.
The scientific program on the second day of the main conference was structured into six sessions in two parallel tracks, covering the following topics:
- AI for Software Engineering in Practice (II)
- Security, Compliance and Regulatory Compliance
- AI and ML for Software Engineering
- Measurement and Smart Contract Development
- AI for SE and Continuous Experimentation
- AI for Testing and Quality Assurance
The conference closed with a look at PROFES 2025, which will take place in Salerno, Italy, during the first week of December 2025.
PROFES conference photos are available here.
