With the advent of new computing paradigms, communication and control technologies, software systems are required to be more and more autonomic, collaborative, self-adaptive and evolutionary. The sustainability of software product and the quality of delivered services imposes greater impact to the various perspectives of people’s economic activities, scientific research and social life, in particular, when software services and systems are operating in an open and volatile environment, such as the Internet. In order to make software work as expected in a dynamic environment with constantly changing user requirements, the software must be aware of the changes, and be adaptive according to the external input and the feedback of the application system. The scope of software cybernetics is rapidly evolving to encompass hybrid cyber-physical systems with hierarchical distributed processes, data-driven decision-making, and observer-in-the-loop at various scales.

This workshop, the 14th International Workshop on Software Cybernetics, will be held in conjunction with the 2017 International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security, and will focus on the theme of “Software Cybernetics in large scale software systems”. It provides an international forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange their original research results, identify future research problems, and report the current best practices in industry.