The term “software engineering” was coined in 1968 at the NATO Software Engineering Conference by Bauer (the chairman of the conference) in his famous statement “What we need, is software engineering”. Since then the discipline has made a long way. It would not be possible without the hard work of both practitioners and researchers.

However, software engineering is now facing grand challenges including increasingly critical role software plays in our daily lives and the increasing size and complexity of software systems. With that, defect-free and rapidly developed software fulfilling user requirements may seem like distant goals. These challenges need to be addressed using new software engineering concepts, methods, processes, technologies, or tools. That is why, in this book, we emphasize the need for tight collaboration and integration of research and practice, to overcome the posed challenges in software engineering, which one would argue that never were greater than today. Authors of the chapters in this book worked in industry on the frontiers of innovation that grows from practice, as well as made important academic contributions in their labs. Thus, we believe they are well prepared to bridge research and practice as suggested by the title of this book. Chapters cover a wide range of topics from mining software repositories (including GitHub), software quality, safety, security and vulnerability to business modeling, requirements engineering (also in agile projects), user experience, extracting business rules from legacy code in COBOL, effort estimation, hybrid cloud model for Industry 4.0, and last but not least software engineering education.