Introduction to the Software Engineering and Formal Methods 2013 special issue

We are in the world in which society is increasingly dependent on software, and so, the quality of this software is more important than ever. Unfortunately, the development of high-quality software is becoming increasingly challenging as complexity grows and systems are often concurrent and distributed. The Software Engineering and Formal Methods communities have developed a range of approaches that help address this problem, but initially there was relatively little interaction between these areas and some saw them as rivals. Thankfully, these attitudes have gradually changed, with the communities accepting that each makes a useful contribution in tackling an important problem. It is arguable that several factors have helped bring together the Software Engineering and Formal Methods communities. For example, there has been increasing interest in topics such as model-based testing that fall within both areas, and so, there is much more overlap between the communities. Recent years have seen increases in computation power and improvements in solution mechanisms such as SAT/SMT solvers and model checkers. This has led to verification and static analysis techniques, developed in the formal methods community, scaling to much larger systems and being used by many more software engineers. However, events that bring these communities together have also played a crucial role.