Foreword of the Thematic Track: ICT Verification and Validation

ICT systems are assuming a key role in real-life and are involving more and more human judgement, political legal and social aspects, technical facilities and limitations. As a result, guaranteeing that such systems satisfy their functional and non-functional requirements becomes at the same time imperative and increasingly difficult. Challenges descend, among others, from new infrastructures, heterogeneity, openness and continuous evolution, technical and semantic interoperability barriers, security and trust concerns. In this complex scenario, the Verification and Validation (V&V) activities, evolving in parallel with software development, represent an important and fundamental mean for guaranteeing the integrity, adequacy and requirements conformance of the ICT systems.