Digital forensics processes are concerned with discovering, collecting, preserving, analysing, interpreting, and presenting digital evidence from digital sources for proof of (anticipated) wrongdoing and ultimately prosecution of criminal activity. Though some notable progress has been achieved since then, the complexity of both crimes and criminal investigations has also increased tremendously. The availability of large amounts of heterogeneous structured and unstructured data about criminal activities, and the uncertainty of the environments in which these activities occur brings forth both significant challenges and new opportunities for designing and developing software that is intended to either defend itself against criminal attacks or to support the investigation of criminal activities.

The SERF workshop aims to explore the role of software engineering in the design of systems that support digital forensic investigations and/or implement some of the activities of a digital forensic process. More specifically, SERF is intended to be a multi-disciplinary workshop that will bring together researchers and practitioners in the areas of software engineering (SE) and digital forensics to identify existing challenges in the development of software for digital forensics, assess the status of approaches in tackling these challenges, create new opportunities for collaborations in this area, and to strengthen the frontier of SE research in this problem domain. The workshop will also define a "research manifesto" highlighting open and novel research challenges to be addressed by the software engineering community in the forthcoming years.