Design for change: one step at a time

Abstract

Welcome to the first issue of 2007. Last year, it proved to be tremendous in terms of the number of good quality articles submitted to SPIP. This New Year, we expect it to be even better and hope to continue to build on our success. We have received excellent feedback from readers. To improve further, we need more feedback from readers. We have excellent articles the scheduled to be published this year, and a healthy, continuous stream of new articles means that the future of SPIP is looking to be very promising. This issue, once again, contains a mixture of regular and themed articles. The themed articles represent a selection of reworked and extended articles submitted to the 6th Workshop on Business Process Modelling, Design and Support. The underlying theme of the articles is ‘Design for Flexibility’: The need to ensure that systems are flexible enough to reflect and accommodate changes in business processes. Change pervades all aspects of life. With advances in technology, we seem to have become accustomed to the acceleration in terms of the demands and expectations for change. Such trends include more competitive environments, more demanding time-to-market, delivery on demand and various lean processes. The trends have resulted in more dynamic development patterns that are responsive to change, thereby placing similar demands on software process improvement. The regular articles in this issue are also concerned with the development