During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, an international and heterogeneous team of scientists collaborated on a social project to produce a mechanical ventilator for intensive care units (MVM). MVM has been conceived to be produced and used also in poor countries: it is open-source, no patents, cheap, and can be produced with materials that are easy to retrieve.

The coronavirus outbreak dramatically changed the work culture in the software industry. Most software practitioners began working remotely, which significantly revolutionized the traditional software processes landscape. Software development organizations have begun thinking about automating software processes to cope with the challenges raised by remote work. This special issue presents papers describing soft computing solutions for improving traditional software processes and capabilities. This editorial introduces the accepted papers and reflects on their contributions.

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the entire world that the habits of work, freedom, and consumption can change quickly and significantly for an undetermined amount of time. A dynamic environment as such, prompts organizations to move fast in order to leverage changing circumstances as sources of opportunity rather than deadly threats. Drastic changes in work organization, consumption habits, compliance, etc., may require firms to quickly adopt new technology delivering all sorts of added value.

Scientific software plays an important role in critical decision making, for example making weather predictions based on climate models, and computation of evidence for research publications. Recently, scientists have had to retract publications due to errors caused by software faults. Systematic testing can identify such faults in code.

A distributed business process is executed in a distributed computing environment. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm is a popular option for the integration of software services and execution of distributed business processes. Entailment constraints, such as mutual exclusion and binding constraints, are important means to control process execution. Mutually exclusive tasks result from the division of powerful rights and responsibilities to prevent fraud and abuse. In contrast, binding constraints define that a subject who performed one task must also perform the corresponding bound task(s).