Focus section on quality software

Developing software systems to fulfill the requirements of various stakeholders is by no means a simple matter. Quality assurance is required in each phase of the software engineering process including requirements elicitation, software architecture design, program design, implementation, testing, and debugging, because every phase is closely linked with another. The quality of the artifacts from each development phase impacts on the rest of the system. The international conference series on quality software has a long tradition of bringing together researchers and practitioners to present and discuss innovative methods of assuring software quality. The 13th International Conference on Quality Software (QSIC 2013) was held in Nanjing, China, on July 29–30, 2013. The main theme was on the quality of evolving software. We emphasized a holistic view of quality assurance across different phases and aspects of software engineering. QSIC 2013 was technically sponsored by the IEEE Reliability Society. Jian Lv was the General Chair. Arnaud Gotlieb and Zhenyu Chen served as the Program Chairs. The keynote speakers were Mauro Pezzè of Università della Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland, and Magne Jorgensen of Simula Research Laboratory, Norway. Seventy-eight submissions from 21 countries were received. Nineteen regular papers were accepted, representing an acceptance rate of 24%. We had an industry track where experience reports from practitioners were presented. Roberto Bagnara of University of Parma, Italy, cofounder of BUGSENG, was the invited industry speaker. In addition, The Symposium on Engineering Test Harness (TSETH 2013), the workshop on Testing and Verification of Embedded Computing Systems (TVECS 2013), the workshop on Quality and Measurement of Software Model-Driven Developments (QUAMES 2013), and the workshop on Software Quality Assurance of Healthcare System and Embedded System (SQHE 2013) were also held. The proceedings of QSIC 2013 was published by the IEEE Computer Society. We shortlisted six papers from the main conference and invited the authors to submit extended versions to this Focus Section on Quality Software in Software: Practice and Experience. Two papers were accepted after going through up to three rounds of rigorous reviews involving two anonymous reviewers for each article. Automated tools are essential for every stage of the system development life cycle to support the computer-aided software engineering process. There is an abundance of tools to be selected for the different phases. Comparing their effectiveness and the ability to integrate with one another is a nontrivial task. The first paper, entitled ‘Selecting a Software Engineering Tool: Lessons Learnt from Mutation Analysis’ by Mickaël Delahaye and Lydie du Bousquet, studies the comparison and choice of mutation analysis tools as an illustration of their proposed methodology for tool selection. Mutation analysis involves the seeding of faults into programs under test and verifies whether the test suites can detect such faults. Mutation tools vary in the fault models used and their performance in regard to such issues as fault generation and test suite execution. The authors propose a list of comparison criteria for such tools and a list of usage profiles. They find the listing of criteria to be straightforward, but their appraisals to be much harder. They have evaluated the mutation tools for the Java platform. Generalizations to other platforms and other tools are also discussed. This paper is of interest to software testers working on mutation analysis as well as software developers who need to choose which automated tools to use. Safety requirements are crucial to every development phase of an avionic system. The second paper, entitled ‘A Modeling Methodology to Facilitate Safety-Oriented Architecture Design of Industrial Avionics Software’ by Ji Wu, Tao Yue, Shaukat Ali, and Huihui Zhang, presents a safety-oriented architecture modeling methodology to enforce adherence of the avionic system