Internationally each year, thousands of PhDs are awarded in Computer Science and related disciplines. While many result in conference and journal publications, one of the main thesis components, the literature review, is often not published. In recognition of the potential value of these underutilized resources,Software Practice and Experience has dedicated this Focus Section to the publication of papers based on the literature reviews that appeared in PhD theses awarded during 2008. All the submissions were subject to the Journal's normal review process and the best three papers appear here. Most software projects nowadays involve multiple developers often at multiple geographically distributed sites. Successful project development requires that these developers have a common awareness of the state of the project tasks, artefacts, and the activities of the project developers. The first paper of this Focus Section is taken from the PhD of Inrah Omoronyia entitled ‘Sharing Awareness during Distributed Collaborative Software Development’. It presents a comparison of awareness needs, and reviews how they are supported in current tools and techniques. The advent of multicore/manycore architectures, grid computing, and cloud computing has spurred much renewed interest in parallel programming activities. The second paper is taken from the PhD of Horacio Gonzalez-Velez entitled ‘Adaptive Structured Parallelism’. It presents a survey of the skeletal frameworks, which are commonly used patterns of parallel computations, communication, and coordination. These frameworks provide the control flow, nesting, resource monitoring, and portability for parallel programs. In recent years, there has been an explosion of information that is stored in databases of one form or another. Statistical Databases are databases that are used for statistical analysis purposes. They can contain potentially sensitive data and, therefore, raise significant security concerns for protecting the privacy of individuals. The final paper of this Focus Section is taken from the PhD work of Ebaa Fayyoumi entitled ‘Novel Micro-Aggregation Techniques for Secure Statistical Databases’. It surveys the fields of Statistical Disclosure Control and Micro-Aggregation techniques, which are both areas fundamentally important for ensuring that individual responses cannot be extracted from any captured data.