Software is the essential enabler for the new economy and science. It creates new markets and new directions for a more reliable, flexible, and robust society. It empowers the exploration of our world in ever more depth.

However, software often falls short of our expectations. Current software methodologies, tools, and techniques remain expensive and not yet reliable for a highly changeable and evolutionary market. Many approaches have been proven only as case-by-case oriented methods.

This book presents a number of new trends and theories in the direction in which we believe software science and engineering may develop to transform the role of software and science in tomorrow's information society.

This book is an attempt to capture the essence of a new state of art in software science and its supporting technology. The book also aims at identifying the challenges such a technology has to master. It contains papers accepted at the fourth International Conference on New Trends in Software Methodologies Tools and Techniques, IV, (SoMeT_05) held in Tokyo, Japan, from 28th to 30th September 2005, (http://www.somet.soft.iwate-pu.ac.jp/somet_05). This workshop brought together researchers and practitioners to share their original research results and practical development experiences in software science, and its related new challenging technology.

One example we challenge in this conference is Lyee methodology – a newly emerged Japanese software methodology that has been patented in several countries in Europe, Asia, and America, but which is still at an early stage of emerging as a new software style. This conference and the series it continues will also contribute to elaborate on such new trends and related academic research studies and development.

A major goal of this international conference was to gather scholars from the international research community to discuss and share research experiences on new software methodologies, and formal techniques. The conference also investigated other comparable theories and practices in software science, including emerging technologies, from their computational foundations in terms of models, methodologies, and tools. These are essential for developing a variety of information systems research projects and to assess the practical impact on real-world software problems.

SoMeT_02 was held on October 3–5, 2002, in Sorbonne, Paris, France, SoMeT_03 in Stockholm, Sweden, SoMeT_04 in Leipzig, Germany and the conference that these proceedings cover, SoMeT_05, was held in Tokyo, Japan. These events initiate a forthcoming series that will include the 5th conference, SoMeT_W06, to be organized in Quebec, Canada on September 2006 (http://www.somet.soft.iwate-pu.ac.jp/somet_06/).

This book is also in part a means for presenting few selected parts of the results of the Lyee International research project (http://www.lyee-project.soft.iwate-pu.ac.jp), which aims at the exploration and development of novel software engineering methods and software generation tools based on the Lyee framework. This project was sponsored by Catena and other major Japanese enterprises in the area of software methodologies and technologies.

This book participates to provide an opportunity for exchanging ideas and experiences in the field of software technology, opening up new avenues for software development, methodologies, tools, and techniques.

The Lyee framework for example, captures the essence of the innovations, controversies, challenges and possible solutions of the software industry. This world wide patented software approach was born and enriched from experience, and it is time, and again through SoMeT_W05 to try to let it stimulate the academic research on software engineering, attempting to close the gap that has so far existed between theory and practice. We believe that this book creates an opportunity for us in the software science community to think about where we are today and where we are going.

The book is a collection of 26 carefully reviewed best-selected papers by the reviewing committee.

The areas covered in the book are: – Requirement engineering and requirement elicitation, and its tools; – Software methodologies and tools for robust, reliable, non-fragile software design; – Lyee oriented software techniques, and its legacy systems; – Automatic software generation versus reuse, and legacy systems, source code analysis and manipulation; – Software quality and process assessment; – Intelligent software systems design, and software evolution techniques; – Software optimization and formal methods; – Static and dynamic analysis on software performance model, and software maintenance; – End-user programming environment, User-centered Adoption-Centric Reengineering techniques; – Ontology, cognitive models and philosophical aspects of software design; – Software design through interaction, and precognitive software techniques for interactive software entertainment applications; – Business oriented software application models; – Software Engineering models, and formal techniques for software representation, software testing and validation; – Aspect oriented programming; – Other software engineering disciplines.

All papers published in this book are carefully reviewed and selected by SOMET international program committee. Each paper has been reviewed by three or four reviewers and has been revised based on the review reports. The papers were reviewed on the basis of technical soundness, relevance, originality, significance, and clarity. The acceptance rate for the papers listed in this book is 48% in this year SoMeT.

This book was made possible by the collective efforts of all the Lyee International project collaborators and other people and supporters. We gratefully thank Iwate Prefectural University, University of Laval, Catena Co., ISD, Ltd, SANGIKYO co., and others for their overwhelming support. We are especially thankful to the program committee and others who participated in the review of all submitted papers and thanks also for the hot discussion we have had on the PC meetings to select the papers listed in this book.

This book is another milestone in mastering new challenges on software and its new promising technology, within the SoMeT framework and others. Also, it gives the reader new insights, inspiration and concrete material to elaborate and study this new technology.

We would also like to thank and acknowledge the support of the University of Leipzig, Telematik and e-Business group for allowing us to use the Paperdyne System as a conference-supporting tool during all the phases on this transaction.

The Editors