Editorial: Introduction and plans for the future

This is my first editorial after taking over the journal in October of last year. Assuming the responsibility for a successful major journal like STVR is both exhilarating and daunting. It seems just a few weeks ago I was a student, wondering if I could ever get journals like TSE or CACM to publish my papers, but it has actually been 20 years. One of the most exciting events in that time was the creation of STVR in 1991. Authors and readers of STVR owe a debt of gratitude to Derick Yates for founding the journal, to Lee White for serving as North American editor for 16 years and Martin Woodward for serving as editor-in-chief for 15 years. They created and built an excellent journal that has greatly helped the field of software testing. At a more personal level, I am grateful for the confidence that both Martin and Lee showed in asking me to take over first as North American editor, then as editor-in-chief. This is an exciting time. We are entering a golden age in software testing, verification and reliability. The amount of research has proliferated as the number of researchers has grown, testing techniques have matured, numerous conferences and workshops have been created and high-quality testing tools are being sold by vendors and used by practitioners. Most importantly, software companies are taking testing seriously. For much of my career, economics have meant that software did not need to work reliably. Users bought and used software, no matter how bad it was. Thankfully, the market is changing. Software has become more competitive, we are putting software into situations where large amounts of money and human lives are at risk, we are embedding software into devices that consumers expect to work perfectly and e-commerce means that businesses succeed or fail based on the quality of the software. On top of all this is the crucial factor of security: most security vulnerabilities today arise from software faults. Taken together, this means that what researchers and educators are selling (how to build better software) has become essential to the success of most major software companies. As testing, verification and reliability are more important to the software industry, the journal of Software Testing, Verification and Reliability has a greater responsibility than ever before to publish useful research in building better software. In that context, let me describe some of the changes I hope to bring to the journal. As evident from the journal’s Web site (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/softwaretesting), the editorial board now has 40 members, 25 of whom are new. Please join me in welcoming all new members. The editorial board is comprised of recognized leaders in software engineering and is essential to the journal in many ways, including updating the aims and scope of the journal. I invite all readers to review the new version on the Web site. We have many more plans for the future. One of my goals is to speed up response to authors. Authors deserve a response within 3 months, and a reviewing process of more than 6 months is a serious problem. The journal will be monitoring the responsiveness of reviewers and, when reviewers