I would like to wish all readers a very happy and healthy 2014.

This issue includes two regular papers and a special section. The regular papers deal with the disparate topics of global software development and software process improvement.

Advances in technology allow developers to work with colleagues across the globe, greatly facilitating global software development. In “Project managers in global software development teams: a study of the effects on productivity and performance,” Ricardo Colomo-Palacios, Cristina Casado-Lumbreras, Pedro Soto-Acosta, Francisco José García-Peñalvo and Edmundo Tovar describe the implications of global software development for software project managers, including differences in productivity. An analysis of survey data revealed that global software development teams reported lower productivity figures than in-house teams and that project managers’ performance may be adversely affected by such distributed development. The authors conclude that strong leadership is needed for successful global software development.

The second of our regular papers deals with software process improvement. In “Critical Success Factors Taxonomy for Software Process Deployment,” the authors Sussy Bayona-Oré, Jose A. Calvo-Manzano, Gonzalo Cuevas and Tomas San-Feliu present a taxonomy of critical success factors for software process deployment. The authors hope that the taxonomy will improve communication by providing a common language for use in the software improvement process.

The special section includes papers that were inspired by the RAISE’12 Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence Synergies in Software Engineering that was co-located with ICSE 2012 in Zurich, Switzerland. The guest editors, Tim Menzies and Marjan Mernik, have done an excellent job in bringing this special section to press. They have provided a very helpful introduction to the selected papers. I would like to thank the guest editors for all their hard work on this issue.

Please send any suggestions or comments on this issue to rachel.harrison@brookes.ac.uk.