On behalf of the conference Organizing Committee, we extend you a warm welcome to the 31st International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2020), organized by the University of Coimbra, Portugal. We look forward for a conference filled with ideas from industry and academia.

ISSRE has become over the years a forum to present the best world research in software reliability engineering, it boasts the largest industry participation among advanced technical conferences. Architects, QA leads, project managers and researchers can select from a large set of talks and never see each other at the conference! This is the perfect training opportunity for senior technical staff.

On behalf of the conference Organizing Committee, we extend you a warm welcome to the 31st International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2020), organized by the University of Coimbra, Portugal. We look forward for a conference filled with ideas from industry and academia.

ISSRE has become over the years a forum to present the best world research in software reliability engineering, it boasts the largest industry participation among advanced technical conferences. Architects, QA leads, project managers and researchers can select from a large set of talks and never see each other at the conference! This is the perfect training opportunity for senior technical staff.

Initially planned to be held in Coimbra, the worldwide situation regarding COVID-19 forced moving ISSRE 2020 into a full online conference experience. In this context, the organizing committee analyzed multiple alternative formats for running the conference, trying to put together a number of original and creative presentation and interaction modalities for the different tracks of ISSRE. We intend to make the conference a great experience for attendees!he program includes two outstanding keynote speakers, Westley Weimer, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Michigan, USA, and Paulo Marques, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Feedzai, Portugal, a leading data science and machine learning company managing risk and fraud prevention for worldwide financial institutions. Westley Weimer provides us with an overview of recent research in the area using medical imaging techniques to measure patterns of neural activity have to help understanding what goes on in our brains when we carry out software engineering activities, while Paulo Marques discusses the impact of having ML-based systems making autonomous decisions that impact human lives and outcomes, and what type of properties we would like such systems to exhibit. These two talks discuss modern and interesting aspects of software reliability engineering from complementary perspectives, academia and industry.

We would like to thank all the authors/contributors for submitting their work to ISSRE and for giving us the opportunity to assemble a high-quality program. Last but not least, we recognize that the high quality of the program is the ultimate result of the review activities carried out by the members of the different Program Committees.

We hope you will enjoy an exciting and stimulating ISSRE 2020!

October 2020
Marco Vieira
Henrique Madeira