Relating software validation to technology trends

Large scale software engineering is undergoing substantial shifts due to a combination of technological and economic developments. These include the prevalence of software for embedded systems, global software development across geographically distributed teams, the technological shift towards multi-core platforms, and the inevitable shift towards software being used as a service. In this overview article, we discuss some of the challenges that lie ahead for software validation, due to such technological developments. In particular, we provide a brief introduction to the papers appearing in this special issue, many of which specifically focus on validation of software running on real-time embedded systems.