Papers and articles discussing several significant advances tin the software testing and validation field.

Software testing is a critical aspect of the software development process, and this heavily illustrated reference takes professionals on a complete tour of this increasingly important, multi-dimensional area. The book offers a practical understanding of all the most critical software testing topics and their relationships and inter-dependencies. This unique resource utilizes a wealth of graphics that support the discussions to offer a clear overview of software testing, from the definition of testing and the value and purpose of testing, through the complete testing process with all its activities, techniques and documentation, to the softer aspects of people and teams working with testing. Practitioners find numerous examples and exercises presented in each chapter to help ensure a complete understanding of the material. The book supports the ISTQB certification and provides a bridge from this to the ISO 29119 Software Testing Standard in terms of extensive mappings between the two; this is a truly unique feature.

The designer of a software system, like the architect of a building, needs to be aware of the construction techniques available and to choose the ones that are the most appropriate. This book provides the implementer of software systems with a guide to 25 different techniques for the complete development processes, from system definition through design and into production. The techniques are described against a common background of the traditional development path, its activities and deliverable items. In addition the concepts of metrics and indicators are introduced as tools for both technical and managerial monitoring and control of progress and quality. The book is intended to widen the mental toolkit of system developers and their managers, and will also introduce students of computer science to the practical side of software development. With its wide-ranging treatment of the techniques available and the practical guidance it offers, it will prove an important and valuable work.

This volume contains a selection of revised papers that were presented at the Software Aspects of Robotic Systems, SARS 2011 Workshop and the Machine Learning for System Construction, MLSC 2011 Workshop, held during October 17-18 in Vienna, Austria, under the auspices of the International Symposium Series on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification, and Validation, ISoLA. The topics covered by the papers of the SARS and the MLSC workshop demonstrate the breadth and the richness of the respective fields of the two workshops stretching from robot programming to languages and compilation techniques, to real-time and fault tolerance, to dependability, software architectures, computer vision, cognitive robotics, multi-robot-coordination, and simulation to bio-inspired algorithms, and from machine learning for anomaly detection, to model construction in software product lines to classification of web service interfaces. In addition the SARS workshop hosted a special session on the recently launched KOROS project on collaborating robot systems that is borne by a consortium of researchers of the faculties of architecture and planning, computer science, electrical engineering and information technology, and mechanical and industrial engineering at the Vienna University of Technology. The four papers devoted to this session highlight important research directions pursued in this interdisciplinary research project.

Although software engineering can trace its beginnings to a NATO conf- ence in 1968, it cannot be said to have become an empirical science until the 1970s with the advent of the work of Prof. Victor Robert Basili of the University of Maryland. In addition to the need to engineer software was the need to understand software. Much like other sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology, software engineering needed a discipline of obs- vation, theory formation, experimentation, and feedback. By applying the scientific method to the software engineering domain, Basili developed concepts like the Goal-Question-Metric method, the Quality-Improvement- Paradigm, and the Experience Factory to help bring a sense of order to the ad hoc developments so prevalent in the software engineering field. On the occasion of Basili’s 65th birthday, we present this book c- taining reprints of 20 papers that defined much of his work. We divided the 20 papers into 6 sections, each describing a different facet of his work, and asked several individuals to write an introduction to each section. Instead of describing the scope of this book in this preface, we decided to let one of his papers, the keynote paper he gave at the International C- ference on Software Engineering in 1996 in Berlin, Germany to lead off this book. He, better than we, can best describe his views on what is - perimental software engineering.