It is the time of trust and transformation in software. We want explainable AI to assist us in dialogue, write our programs, test our software, and improve how we communicate. The digitalization, automation, and transformation to be able to use new technologies are all much to slow even if things change at a lightning speed. Change is the only thing we can be sure will happen. Evaluating and assessing quality of software sounds easy but is only as good as you design it to be. Having a multi-facetted perspective is important when analyzing complex contexts. In software, listening skills and asking the right questions to the right people is often invaluable to complement blunt data. On the other side - much information is probably missing as you are too easily getting “only” what you asked for. So, we cannot judge what we cannot observe – and analyzing this data, is another issue all together. Therefore, it is easy to lose perspective in a fast-changing world. Despite drowning in tools, we still miss a lot of them. The threshold of using a tool is high, as we cannot trust them, and we cannot be sure that the data these tools collect does represent what we want to investigate. Therefore, the role of the scientist is more important than ever. Trusting the scientific process, utilizing multiple methods, and combining them is the receipt! Another goal is doing our best to select topics and collaborators – as building better software (quality) for humanity. It starts with you and me. I hope I will in this context be able to touch upon areas like security, testing, automation, AI/ML, ethics and “human in the loop”, analysis, tools, and technical debt, with a focus on evaluations and assessments.

Sigrid Eldh is a senior specialist and researcher at Ericsson, leading Ericsson’s research in the area in software engineering, testing, product quality, incl. fault-related activities. She is also an adjunct professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, and a senior lecturer at Mälardalen University, where she took her PhD “On Test Design”. With 35+ years of knowledge of the software industry, she is an innovator with patents and publications, leading large research collaborations on test automation for which she been nominated as best women in leadership at Eurekanetworks.org in 48 countries. Her research focus on improving quality of software, ways of working.