In this issue

The six papers in this issue deal with a wide range of topics that are of considerable interest to industry and to society: predicting fault proneness, software certification, software cost estimation, risk management for medical device software, generating test data and identifying design patterns. In ‘‘Empirical validation of object-oriented metrics for predicting fault proneness models’’, Yogesh Singh, Arvinder Kaur and Ruchika Malhotra investigate whether various object-oriented metrics can accurately predict fault proneness if faults are classified at different severity levels. Their results suggest that some object-oriented metrics can indeed be used to predict fault proneness in certain object-oriented systems. Certification of software artifacts is becoming increasingly important to the software and IT industry. In ‘‘A software product certification model’’, Petra Heck, Martijn Klabbers and Marko van Eekelen present a conformance assessment model for software artifacts. The authors show how the model can be used for various kinds of certification, from requirements definitions to executables. The model can also be tailored to include expert reviews and formal verification if necessary. This paper shows how applied software engineering research can result in products that are of immediate use in industry. Another topic of great interest to industry is software cost estimation. In ‘‘A new perspective on data homogeneity in software cost estimation: a study in the embedded systems domain’’, Ayşe Bakır, Burak Turhan and Ayşe Bener investigate the types of data that can be used for software cost estimation for embedded systems. They also discuss the effect of training dataset size on prediction performance. They conclude that it is better to use cross-domain data for embedded software cost estimation. Health care is becoming increasingly dependent on the software embedded in medical devices. The paper ‘‘Risk management capability model for the development of medical device software’’ by Fergal Mc Caffery, John Burton and Ita Richardson considers the thoroughness of current regulations for risk management in medical device software in comparison with the Capability Maturity Model Integration framework. They then present a Risk Management Capability Model for the medical device software industry. The need