Researchers in the field of software process seem to have an interesting relationship with managers and the management of software projects. Clearly managers make many of the decisions on the project. These decisions deal directly with the planning, execution, and control of development activities which have a significant impact on the process. Yet, how much research in the process area is focused on management, or management decisions and their impact? In this special journal issue, we have selected three papers which deal with software project management at different levels and from different perspectives. In the first paper titled, “Benefits of Global Software Development: Exploring the Unexplored”, the authors, Conchúir et al. address the increasingly common paradigm of globally distributed software development (GSD) projects. This paper takes a managerial view of the costs and benefits associated with GSD projects and provides insight into less commonly recognized benefits and costs. The paper makes distinctions among these costs and benefits as “referred” or “inferred” and categorizes them into (1) organizational, (2) team and (3) process/task related issues. The insights are based on qualitative case study information. The second paper titled, “Accurate Estimates Without Local Data?” continues the theme of addressing management level issues by dealing with the important topic of project cost estimation. Providing good cost estimates is a key software project management responsibility that is critical not only to support bids made to external customers, but also to justify resource requirements to internal project sponsors. This work by Menzies et al. continues the quest to obtain better quantitative cost estimates faster. The authors use machine learning tools to show that in many cases, tuning COCOMO models using detailed, hard-to-collect “internal tuning data” does not substantially reduce variation in cost estimation results. Project managers are better off using “project tuning data” to reduce estimate variance in most cases. The authors have based their findings on 10 case studies. In the final paper titled, “Quantitative Defects Management in Iterative Development with BiDefect”, authors Gou et al. also address an important management function which is to manage and control project quality and defects. The authors present a quantitative approach for managing defects when an iterative development methodology is used. The authors site three major challenges associated with managing defects quantitatively with the iterative development paradigm. The challenges are (1) identifying appropriate “control points” in each iteration, (2) selecting appropriate measures and corresponding measurement methods, and (3) determining the optimal amount of effort for performing testing and defect fixing activities. The authors show how the BiDefect approach and models correct these problems. The approach has been applied at a leading Chinese telecommunication firm. Results from the case study are reported. The three articles presented in this issue were based on papers that were selected as being among the best papers of the 2008 International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) held in Leipzig, Germany in May of 2008. All of the papers went through an additional reviewing process and were significantly expanded from their original conference versions. The acceptance rate for these papers was under 8%.