Preface: Special issue on software verification and testing

International audienceSoftware is now everywhere and guiding every part of our daily life (Web applications, smartphones, video games, cars, information systems, etc.). Designing and developing software systems has always been a tedious and error-prone task, and the ever increasing system complexity is making matters even worse. Although we are still far from providing widespread techniques and tools avoiding the existence of bugs in a system under development, we know how to automatically chase and find bugs that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to detect manually. Software Verification and Testing is a research discipline of software engineering aiming at augmenting the quality of software by looking for bugs and checking that the developed software satisfies the expected requirements (functional and non-functional). There are several techniques for debugging and obtaining high quality software such as model checking, model-based testing, theorem proving, symbolic execution, run-time verification, fault diagnosis, or static analysis. This Special Issue (SI) is dedicated to Software Verification and Testing (SVT) and more precisely aims at contributing to the challenge of improving the usability of formal methods in software engineering. This SI is a follow-up of the SVT track that we organized at the 31th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, held in Pisa, Italy on April 3-8, 2016. The track received 58 full paper submissions. After a careful reviewing process, the international Program Committee decided to select 13 papers for presentation during the symposium and inclusion in the SAC'16 proceedings. From these 13 papers, the five best papers were selected and invited for an extended version to this special issue. We also received new submissions since an open call circulated for this SI. All the submissions went through a rigorous peer review process; four papers were finally accepted and are included in this special issue. These papers provide key insights on different formal verification and testing approaches