Software development process has been studied for long within the field of software engineering. However, in the last two decades two events can be identified which impacted dramatically on the unfolding of the discipline: the advent of Agile Methods and Cloud Computing. Before a software system was something to be analyzed, designed, programmed, tested, released and maintained. After, these phases so neatly defined started fading their borders.

In 2009 Patrick Debois coined the term “DevOps” to cover a new framework of software development where the idea–development–deployment cycles went from months to days or hours. Patrick Debois and  Andrew Shafer realized the necessity to combine software development and system administration skills: two worlds considered disjoint for long. Emphasis was also put on the deployment, previously considered secondary to development itself.

Academia and industry are currently facing the challenges opened by the Devops approach: tools, rapid development–deployment processes, effects on team performance, analytics, trustworthiness, microservices… The Summer School on Software Engineering and Continuous Development aims at discussing some of these issues, present the current solutions and trends and put together professionals, academics and students in an informal and productive atmosphere.