Software drives today's world. Daily needs like electricity supply, transportation , groceries, are all empowered by software, and not to mention communication and emails. This dependency will only increase, given innovations like the Internet-of-things, 3D printing, self-driving cars and drones. Therefore, software correctness is more important than ever: nobody wants drones to drop on our heads, autonomous cars to crash, or intrudes to enter our house via Internet-of-things devices. Hence, rigorous verification and testing is of paramount importance , as a technique to assess and improve the quality of software systems. This is exactly the topic of the Software Verification and Testing (SVT) track of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. This special issue of the Journal on Science of Computer Programming arose from the SVT track at the 30 th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, held in Salamanca, Spain on April 13-17, 2015. The track received 60 full paper submissions. After a careful reviewing process, the international Program Committee decided to select 14 papers for presentation during the symposium and inclusion in the SAC'15 proceedings. From these 14 papers, the six best papers were selected and invited for an extended version to this special issue. These extended papers went again through a rigorous peer review process; five papers were finally accepted and are included in this special issue. The papers included here provide key insights on different formal verification and testing approaches.