The Conference on Energy Consumption, Quality of Service, Reliability, Security, and Maintainability of Computer Systems and Networks (EQSEM) was held as a virtual conference on October 20–21, 2020. This paper summarises the objectives and proceedings of this conference. It then briefly presents the keynotes and other papers which were presented. Then, in the context of the EU-funded research project SDK4ED which motivated this conference, we outline several solutions that are being developed for managing the potential inter-dependencies and corresponding trade-offs between design-time and runtime qualities in software applications, and review the key functionalities that have been implemented within the SDK4ED integrated platform as of this writing. Then, we briefly introduce four papers among those presented at the EQSEM Conference that are included in this issue of the journal SN Computer Science, presenting relevant research achievements of the SDK4ED Project on software maintainability, reliability, and energy efficiency.