Editorial: Software Reliability and Dependability Engineering

As software plays an increasingly important role in our lives, it is essential to maintain its reliability, and generally dependability. Software bugs can cause huge financial losses and dangerous accidents; the safety risks from software are underscored these days to even the non-technical public by the emergence of autonomous software-based systems. Thus, it is important to explore principled approaches to reduce the harm from defects in software, preferably by removing them as early as possible, but also by fault tolerance and by predicting their effects so as to inform mitigation actions.