The 2nd International Conference on Product Focused Software Process - provement(PROFES2000)continuedthesuccessofthePROFES'99conference. It was organized in Oulu, Finland, June 20-22, 2000. The PROFES conference has its roots in the PROFES Esprit project (http://www.ele.vtt.?/profes/), but by 1999 it had already evolved into a full-?edged general purpose conference gaining wide-spread international popularity. ThemainthemeofPROFES2000wasprofessionalsoftwareprocessimpro- ment (SPI) motivated by product and service quality needs. SPI is facilitated by softwareprocessassessment,softwaremeasurement,processmodeling, andte- nology transfer and has become a practical tool for quality software engineering and management. The conference addresses both the solutions found in practice aswellasrelevantresearchresultsfromacademia.Thepurposeoftheconference is to bring into the light the most recent ?ndings and results of the area and to stimulate discussion between the researchers, experienced professionals, and technology providers for SPI. WiththetremendousgrowthofInternetandtelecommunicationapplications, it is ever more important to emphasize the quality in softwareproducts and p- cesses.With plenty of new people andnew software-basedapplications emerging at a very fast pace, it is easy to forget the importance of product and process improvement,and to repeat the same mistakesalreadymade in moretraditional software development.
The PROFES conference has addressed this issue by - plicitly enhancing the conferencetopicstowardsInternetandtelecommunication applications. Another important addition is the Learning Software Organizations (LSO2000) workshop, which was organized in conjunction with PROFES 2000. TheLSOworkshopseriesisacommunicationforumthataddressesthe questions of organizational learning from a software point of view and builds upon exi- ing work on knowledge management and organizational learning. LSO comp- mented the PROFES program encouraging fruitful discussions and information exchange between the participants of PROFES 2000 and LSO 2000.