This book provides a hands-on introduction to runtime verification which guides the reader from zero to sufficient practical knowledge required to consider and apply it in industry. It starts with almost no assumptions on the knowledge of the reader and provides exercises throughout the book through which the reader builds their own runtime verification tool. All that is required are basic programming skills and a good working knowledge of the object-oriented paradigm, ideally Java. Drawing from years of the authors' real-world experience, the reader progresses from manually writing runtime verification code to instrumenting monitoring using aspect-oriented programming, after which they explore increasing levels of specification abstraction: automata, regular expressions, and linear time temporal logic. A range of other topics is also explored in the book, including real-time properties, concerns of efficiency and persistence, integration with testing and architectural considerations. The book is written for graduate students specializing in software engineering as well as for industry professionals who need an introduction to the topic of runtime verification. While the book focuses on underlying foundations and practical techniques, it additionally provides for each chapter a reading list in the appendix for the interested reader who would like to deepen their knowledge in a particular area.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Runtime Verification, RV 2018, held in Limassol, Cyprus, in November 2018. The 21 full papers presented together with 3 short papers and 3 tool papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions. The RV conference is concerned with all aspects of monitoring and analysis of hardware, software and more general system executions. Runtime verification techniques are lightweight techniques to assess correctness, reliability, and robustness; these techniques are significantly more powerful and versatile than conventional testing, and more practical than exhaustive formal verification. Chapter "Hardware-based Runtime Verification with Embedded Tracing Units and Stream Processing" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.