– Models are becoming essential and integral to software engineering efforts, and often multiple types of models are used in engineering of a single product or line. Yet multiple models bring the added complexity of not only their individual correctness, but the correctness of the relationships among them. In “Automated verification of model transformations based on visual contracts”, Guerra, de Lara, Wimmer, Kappel, Kusel, Retschitzegger, Schonbock, and Schwinger provide a declarative language for specifying correctness contracts governing transformations and explore tool support for verifying them. – Automatically detecting and correcting code defects, especially those that lead to problems in the maintenance phase, has potential to significantly improve the economics of the software lifecycle by reducing the human time needed for this essential task. In “Maintainability defects detection and correction: a multi-objective approach”, Ouni, Kessentini, Sahraoui, and Boukadoum describe a search-based approach to automating this activity. – Refactoring of code is a critical and never-ending task in real world software development. One is constantly discovering new ways of modularizing, grouping, and generalizing the conceptual constructs and structural relationships in one’s code in order to better accommodate future change, clarify or improve correctness, and even to improve performance. One important type of refactoring is when