The Third International Conference on Product Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2001) continued the success of the PROFES'99 and PROFES 2000 conferences. PROFES 2001 was organized in Kaiserslautern, Germany, September 10 13, 2001. The PROFES conference has its roots in the PROFES Esprit project (http: //www.ele.vtt.fi/profes/), but it quickly evolved into a full fledged general purpose conference in 1999 and since then it has gained wide spread international popularity. As in previous years, the main theme of PROFES 2001 was professional software process improvement (SPI) motivated...