TAIC-PART 2008 - Testing: Academic & Industrial conference - Practice and research techniques, special section editorial

Almost all organisations, irrespective of their size, rely on IT systems. Individuals are making increasing use of web applications for personal and social activities. Furthermore, as systems in general become more technologically advanced, an increasing proportion of the implementation is in software rather than hardware. As a result, the security of systems and the data they contain is increasingly dependent on the security of the associated software. The trend is clear, software is becoming pervasive and as a result software quality assurance is a crucial everyday concern for all of us. Software testing is by far the most important means of assuring software quality. The evidence is that deficient testing of both functional and non-functional properties is one of the major sources of software and system errors [1,2]. In 2002, NIST estimated the cost of software failure to the US economy at $60,000,000,000; amounting to 0.6% of GDP [3]. The same report found that more than one third of the costs of software failure could be eliminated by an improved testing infrastructure. As these data reveal, research on software testing has the potential to make an enormous impact on the global economy. TAIC-PART 2008 is the third conference in a series of highly successful events. The conference aims to bring together industrialists and academics to promote collaboration on problems in software testing. Among the wide range of topics in computer science and software engineering, software testing is an ideal candidate for academic and industrial collaboration because advances in research can have such wide ranging and far reaching implications for industry. Conversely, the advances in computing and communications technology and the growth of the associated software engineering activity are producing new research challenges at an increasing rate. The event was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (the EPSRC). The EPSRC is the UK’s primary funding body for research in Science and Engineering. The EPSRC evaluated TAIC-PART on completion by peer review and gave it the highest rating possible (out-standing). TAIC-PART 2008 received 25 paper submissions. After a rigorous reviewing process in which each paper was subjected to at least three independent reviews followed by programme committee discussions, 15 papers were accepted. Four of these papers are from industry, eight from academia and three from collaborations between industry and academia. The papers originate from eight countries in North and South America and Europe. The two papers in this special section are significantly extended versions of those TAIC-PART papers that received the strongest support from the referees. Each of the extended papers have been