Guest editorial: special issue on concurrent software quality

Today, multi-core hardware and cloud platforms have become ubiquitous, which puts us at a fundamental turning point in software development. In order for software applications to benefit from the continued exponential advances in hardware systems, the applications will need to be well-written concurrent programs. Although for the past decade we have witnessed incrementally more programmers writing concurrent programs, the vast majority of applications today are still sequential due to the lack of effective tools that support the development of concurrent programs. This trend necessitates the use of advanced methods to redesign the existing tools that remain optimized for sequential program development. We are interested in research that advances the state of the art in different phases of concurrent software development, with the goal to help developers write high quality concurrent programs. Following an open call for papers, the special issue received a total of 19 submissions, of which 2 survey papers and 9 research papers were accepted for publication. Each manuscript was reviewed by at least two reviewers. Software Qual J https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-018-9415-9