Nowadays some of the mandatory keywords for ICT software are heterogeneity, openness and continuous evolution. These requirements, that represent per se quite difficult tasks to be satisfied, become even more critical when ICT applications have also to fulfill technical and semantic interoperability, as well as security and trust concerns.

In this scenario the Verification and Validation (V&V) activities, able to evolve in parallel with software development, represent important and fundamental actions for guaranteeing the integrity, adequacy and requirements conformance of the produced artifacts. New proposals, techniques, methodologies, practical approaches and automatic facilities targeting ICT quality assurance become the solutions for speeding up the development process, while reducing the effort and costs of V&V phase and improving the faults detection capability.

To this purpose the QUATIC 2012 ICT Verification and Validation track collects innovative solutions, proposals and experiences with particular attention on approaches and methods that can be easily integrated in the ICT lifecycle and can reduce the gap between research and practice. Thus the papers of this track focus in particular on proposals for: managing testing phase, selecting test cases, monitoring functional and non-functional properties, managing exception handling, exploiting dataset and general information for improving the overall quality.

In industry one of the most critical phases in V&V process is test management that can be faced from different perspectives. The Quatic2012 V&V track includes two works in this direction: the former specifically focusing test and risk management, the latter reporting on the experience of a railway signaling company in testing execution.
In particular in “Integrating Test and Risk Management” Simon and Simon analyze the integration of knowledge and experience in Risk and Test management to improve their respective results. The integration is based on two widely used and acknowledged standards so to enable the industry to leverage synergies between these two critical phases.

Considering GUI testability problem, an interesting experience within the railways applications is addressed in “A GUI Testability Problem: a case study in the railway signaling domain”. In this paper Bonacchi and coauthors present the solution adopted by a railway signaling company for testing an equipment configuration tool. The choice of testing techniques and of test case selection strategies is done by considering the available Graphical User Interface built on standard windowing systems, and the potential impact on the safety of the overall signaling system.

With the increasing evolution of software systems, the capability of validating functional and non-functional properties at run-time becomes more and more important. A solution based on the configuration of an event-based monitoring system is presented by Bertolino, Di Marco and Lonetti in “Complex events specification for properties validation”. Their easy-to-use property-driven validation approach, based on a comprehensive Property Meta-Model (PMM), represents a simple and machine processable specification language that allows for defining complex events involved into functional and non functional properties and for automatically configuring an event based monitoring system.

Considering instead system failures at programming level, and in particular exception-handling mechanisms, the solution proposed by Hanazumi and de Melo for concurrent and distributed systems manages failures at architectural level so to prevent systems from suddenly stopping an ongoing computation. In “Coordinating Exceptions of Java Systems: Implementation and Formal Verification” they propose a Coordinated Atomic Action model to guide users to treat exceptions in a well-organized way.

Available datasets, past experience and storyboard are extremely important for improving the effectiveness of ICT Verification and Validation activities. Two papers in the track deal with V&V information: the former based on datasets, the latter using storyboards.

In “Using Association Rules to Identify Similarities between Software Datasets” Anwar and coauthors evidence how software developers and managers can exploit previous studies and information to avoid analogous defects and mistakes when a similarity exists between their software and the software represented in the public datasets. Authors in particular explain how to find association rules from the dataset in order to identify the overlaps and determine the strength of the similarity between the datasets.

In “Interactive Multimedia Storyboard for Facilitating Stakeholder Interaction- Supporting Continuous Improvement in IT-Ecosystems” Pham and coauthors propose a new kind of interaction between engineers and stakeholders: a dedicated multimedia storyboard documentation of user requirements, which enables deep stakeholder comprehension without the necessity for learning a sophisticated notation. The improved comprehension of requirements is useful for validating new ideas and proposing suggestion and corrections.