Human centered systems are systems where humans interact, supported by technology, to accomplish complex tasks that involve a great deal of autonomy and individual responsibility and, at the same time, global coordination and sharing of information. Examples include large financial systems and computer-aided design environments for new product lines. The talk focuses on software processes, i.e. the processes through which software applications are conceived, developed, deployed, and evolved. The talk will provide a retrospective view of software process research over the past thirty years, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approaches, their successes and failures. It will then turn to an evaluation of the current state of the art and will examine some important research directions for the future.