I would like to take this opportunity to wish all readers a Very Happy New Year.

This issue includes four regular papers and a special section. The first two of our regular papers are concerned with the important topic of requirements engineering.

In “Automated measurement of models of requirements,” Martin Monperrus, Benoit Baudry, Joel Champeau, Brigitte Hoeltzener, and Jean-Marc Jézéquel propose a requirements metamodel which can be used to specify requirements metrics. The metamodel formally captures requirements in a way that allows a set of metrics to be computed automatically.

In “A streamlined, cost-effective database approach to manage requirements traceability,” Hossein Saiedian, Andrew Kannenberg, and Serhiy Morozov describe a tool designed to solve the requirements traceability problem. The tool is tested using a case study in the real world. The paper describes how the new method saved time in comparison with manual methods for traceability and how the output also contained fewer errors.

The final two regular papers in this issue are concerned with the disparate topics of software maintenance and quality models. Industry spends a great deal of time and money on software maintenance, and one of the aspects which contributes to the cost of maintenance is performing change requests. In “The Bug Report Duplication Problem: An Exploratory Study,” Yguaratã Cerqueira Cavalcanti, Paulo Anselmo da Mota Silveira Neto, Daniel Lucredio, Tassio Vale, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, and Silvio Romero de Lemos Meira present a study in which change request data from private and open source projects were analyzed. All of the projects were found to have duplicate change requests. The main reason for the duplication was found to be the profile of the submitter. The authors suggest that information visualization techniques could be used to help identify such duplication.

In “Taxonomy of quality metrics for assessing assurance of security correctness,” Moussa Ouedraogo, Reijo M. Savola, Haralambos Mouratidis, David Preston, Djamel Khadraoui, and Eric Dubois present a taxonomy of metrics for quality assurance in a security verification process. The applicability and usefulness of the metrics was assessed by IT security experts who expressed interest in adopting the metrics.

The special section includes extended papers that were originally presented at the 4th International Conference on Tests and Proofs which was held in Malaga, Spain, in 2010. I am very grateful to the guest editors, Gordon Fraser and Angelo Gargantini, for the excellent work they have done in helping to prepare this special section. The guest editors have provided an informative introduction to the selected papers.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions or comments on this issue by emailing me at rachel.harrison@brookes.ac.uk.