Risk Assessment and Risk-Driven Quality Assurance. 4th International Workshop, RISK 2016

Increased connectivity and software complexity leads to an ever-growing demand for techniques to ensure software quality, dependability, reliability and security. The risks that software systems do not meet their intended level of quality can have severe impact on vendors, customers, and even society at large. The precise understanding of risks, has become one of the corner stones for critical decision within complex social and technical environments. Traditional approaches for ensuring system quality address risk implicitly rather than systematically. However, there is a growing interest in enhancing traditional approaches for ensuring system quality by taking risk systematically into account. For instance, in traditional test approaches, test planning and prioritization is often based on an implicit notion of risk; systems, functions, or modules, which are known to be critical, are tested more intensively than others. However, taking risk systematically into account allows for a more rigorous prioritization process which is better documented, less dependent on human guesswork, and more easily supported by tools. The RISK Workshop series has emerged as a high-profile series of events that discusses innovative work in the areas of software risk assessment, testing and the combination thereof. We have been able to look back on four successful years, in which we have been involved in different conferences and initiated a fruitful exchange between scientists from academia as well as from the industry. This volume contains the proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Risk Assessment and Risk-Driven Quality Assurance (RISK 2016) held in October 2016 in Graz, Austria, in conjunction with the 28th International Conference on Testing Software and Systems (ICTSS). RISK 2016 brought together researcher from Europe that study, develop and evaluate innovative techniques, tools, languages and methods for risk assessment and risk-driven quality engineering. During the workshop, the participants discussed 11 peer reviewed contributions tackling challenges of assessing and managing safety, security and reliability risk, and in particular the intersection between these areas.