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 behind 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, as part of SOMET series, contributes on 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 integration in tomorrow's global information society.

This book is an attempt to capture the essence of a new state of the art in software science and its supporting technology. Aiming at identifying the challenges such a technology has to master. It contains highly extensively reviewed papers given at the Seventh International Conference on New Trends in Software Methodology Tools, and Techniques, (SoMeT_08) held in Sharjah (American University in Sharjah), UAE, from 14th to 17th of October 2008, (http://www.aus.edu/conferences/somet08/Conference_Program.php). This conference 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 of the important issues addressed in this book is handling cognitive issues on software development to adapt to user mental state. Tools and techniques have been contributed here. Another aspect we challenged in this conference was intelligent software design in software security. This book, and the series it continues, will also contribute to elaborate on such new trends and related academic research studies and development.

A major goal was to gather scholars from the international research community to discuss and share research experiences on new software methodologies, and techniques. The book 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.

Previous conferences in the series are: SoMeT_02, Paris, France, SoMeT_03, Stockholm, Sweden, SoMeT_04, Leipzig, Germany, SoMeT_05, Tokyo, Japan, SoMeT_06, Quebec, Canada, SoMeT_07, Rome, Italy; SoMeT_08 in Sharjah, UAE, covered in this book. The next conference will be in September 2009, in Prague, Czech Republic (http://www.somet.soft.iwate-pu.ac.jp/somet_09/).

This book provides an opportunity for exchanging ideas and experiences in the field of software technology, opening up new avenues for software development, methodologies, tools, and techniques, especially software security and program coding diagnosis and related software maintenance techniques aspects. Also, we have emphasized on human centric software methodologies, end-user development techniques, and human emotional reasoning for best performance harmony between the design tool and the user.

Issues discussed here are research practices, techniques and methodologies proposing and reporting solutions needed for global world business. We believe that this creates an opportunity for the software science community to think about where we are today and where we are going.

The book is a collection of 28 carefully refereed, best-selected papers by the reviewing committee.

The areas covered are:

• Software engineering aspects on software security, programs diagnosis and maintenance

• Static and dynamic analysis on software performance model

• Software security aspects, and networking

• Practical artefact on software security, software validation and diagnosis

• Software optimization and formal methods

• Requirement engineering and requirement elicitation

• Software methodologies and related techniques

• Automatic software generation, re-coding, and legacy systems

• Software quality and process assessment

• Intelligent software systems and evolution

• End-user requirement engineering, programming environment for Web applications

• Ontology and philosophical aspects on software engineering

• Cognitive Software and human behavioural analysis in software design

All the papers published are carefully reviewed and selected by the SOMET international reviewing committee. Each was reviewed by three and up to four reviewers and was revised based on the review reports. The papers were reviewed on the basis of technical soundness, relevance, originality, significance, and clarity.

This book is also a collective effort from many industrial partners and colleagues throughout the world. We gratefully thank Iwate Prefectural University, especially its President Prof. Makoto Taniguchi; Sangikyo Co., especially its president Mr. M. Sengoku; the American University of Sharjah; UAE, ARISES; and others for their overwhelming support. We are especially grateful to the reviewing committee and others who participated in the hard effective review of all submitted papers and thank them also for the hot discussions we have had at the review evaluation meetings that selected the final papers.

The outcome is another milestone in mastering new challenges on software and its new promising technology, within SoMeT's consecutive events. Also, it gives the reader new insights, inspiration and concrete material to elaborate and study this new technology.

Finally, we would like to thank and acknowledge the support of the Microsoft, Conference Management Tool team for the support it has provided on the use of Microsoft CMT System as a conference-supporting tool during all the phases of the SOMET transactions.

The Editors