Welcome to the special issue of the Automated Software Engineering journal. Software now flourishes at many scales, from giant service-oriented cloud systems to tiny embedded IOT devices. Automation approaches for software design, construction, verification, and deployment are now regularly applied by practitioners to build scalable and robust software systems. As software engineering researchers, we must continue to improve the techniques and tools available to engineers so that this software, which has become central to many aspects of our societies, can be safely and cost-effectively fielded. The problems in constructing good software are substantial, as are the opportunities for improvement and impact for practitioners. This issue contains work automating aspects of design, synthesis, and verification drawn from highly rated papers from the ASE 2015 conference. In their paper “InferringVisual Contracts from Java Programs”, Alshanqiti, Heckel, and Kehrer describe an approach to automatically construct visual contracts from Java programs. Such contracts are important for program understanding, testing, and analysis, but have in the past have required extensive manual effort to construct. Their approach infers accurate visual contracts based on examining program behavior dynamically over execution traces. The resulting specifications include object transformations, preand post-conditions in terms of object structures, parameter and attribute values, and generalised specification by universally quantified (multi) objects, patterns, and invariants. The paper focuses on construction techniques but also explores potential uses for many tasks in software engineering. In “Synthesis of Probabilistic Models for Quality-of-Service Software Engineering”, Gerasimou, Calinescu, and Tamburrelli examine a similar problem of architectural variants in terms of Quality of Service (QoS). They examine a problem

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客座社论：自动化软件工程的高级主题

欢迎阅读《自动化软件工程》杂志的特刊。软件现在在许多规模上蓬勃发展，从巨大的面向服务的云系统到微型嵌入式物联网设备。从业者现在经常应用软件设计、构建、验证和部署的自动化方法来构建可扩展且健壮的软件系统。作为软件工程研究人员，我们必须继续改进工程师可用的技术和工具，以便可以安全且经济高效地部署已成为我们社会许多方面核心的软件。构建优秀软件的问题是巨大的，对于从业者来说，改进和影响的机会也是如此。本期包含设计、综合、以及来自 ASE 2015 会议的高评价论文的验证。在他们的论文“从 Java 程序推断视觉合同”中，Alshanqiti、Heckel 和 Kehrer 描述了一种从 Java 程序自动构建视觉合同的方法。此类合同对于程序理解、测试和分析很重要，但在过去需要大量的人工来构建。他们的方法基于在执行跟踪上动态检查程序行为来推断准确的视觉契约。生成的规范包括对象转换、对象结构、参数和属性值方面的前置和后置条件，以及通用量化（多）对象、模式和不变量的广义规范。本文重点介绍构建技术，但也探讨了软件工程中许多任务的潜在用途。在“服务质量软件工程概率模型综合”中，Gerasimou、Calinescu 和 Tamburrelli 在服务质量 (QoS) 方面研究了架构变体的类似问题。他们检查一个问题