Foreword: ICT verification and validation

Summary form only given. Some of the mandatory keywords for ICT software are heterogeneity, openness and continuous evolution. These requirements, that represent per se quite difficult tasks to be satisfied, become even more critical when ICT applications have also to fulfill technical and semantic interoperability, as well as security and trust concerns. In this scenario the Verification and Validation (V&V) activities, able to evolve in parallel with software development, represent important and fundamental actions for guaranteeing the integrity, adequacy and requirements conformance of the produced artifacts. New proposals, techniques, methodologies, practical approaches and automatic facilities targeting ICT quality assurance become the solutions for speeding up the development process, while reducing the effort and costs of V&V phase and improving the faults detection capability. To this purpose the QUATIC 2012 ICT Verification and Validation track collects innovative solutions, proposals and experiences with particular attention on approaches and methods that can be easily integrated in the ICT lifecycle and can reduce the gap between research and practice. Thus the papers of this track focus in particular on proposals for: managing testing phase, selecting test cases, monitoring functional and non-functional properties, managing exception handling, improving users trust perception of services, exploiting dataset and general information for improving the overall quality.