ICTSS 2012, Aalborg, Denmark

Photo: dinilu

I have been invited to serve on the Program Committee of ICTSS 2012, the 23rd IFIP Int. Conference on Testing Software and Systems, November 19-21, 2012 Aalborg, Denmark.

Please, consider submitting your testing work until June 11, 2012 (abstracts), June 18, 2012 (full papers).

Brian Nielsen, Aalborg University, DK and Carsten Weise, IVU Traffic Technologies, DE are the program chairs. For details see the conference homepage.

Last year, we presented a paper at ICTSS in Paris:

Christian Schwarzl, Bernhard K. Aichernig, and Franz Wotawa. Compositional random testing using extended symbolic transition systems. In Burkhart Wolff and Fatiha Zaïdi, editors, Testing Software and Systems - 23rd IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, ICTSS 2011, Paris, France, November 7-10, 2011. Proceedings, volume 7019 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 179–194. Springer-Verlag, 2011. (PDF)

Industry Day at QSIC 2012, Xi'an, China

Photo: bachmont

The 12th International Conference on Quality Software (QSIC 2012) will be held in Xi'an, China, 27 to 28 of August, 2012. The QSIC series of conferences is an established event bringing together people in the area of software and systems quality.

I was happy to learn that Zhou Chaochen (Chinese Academy of Sciences), my former boss at UNU-IIST in Macao, is the General Chair of the event. Zhou Chaochen is the inventor of the Duration Calculus. I joined the UNU faculty in Macao from 2002 to 2006.

For the first time, QSIC is planning an industry day with a dedicated program committee build from practitioners from industry and applied research. I was invited to join this program committee. Wolfgang Grieskamp (Google) and Hongyu Zhang (Tsinghua University) are the Industry Chairs of QSIC 2012.

Paper Submission Due: 23rd April 2012

Further details can be found on the website of QSIC 2012.

P.S: QSIC is an established conference series. I had my first QSIC paper in 2005 and my latest paper at QSIC 2010:

• Bernhard K. Aichernig and Percy Antonio Pari Salas. Test case generation by OCL mutation and constraint solving. In Kai-Yuan Cai and Atsushi Ohnishi, editors, QSIC 2OO5, Fifth International Conference on Quality Software, Melbourne, Australia, September 19-21, 2005, pages 64–71. IEEE Computer Society Press, 2005. (PDF) (doi:10.1109/QSIC.2005.63)
• Harald Brandl, Martin Weiglhofer, and Bernhard K. Aichernig. Automated conformance verification of hybrid systems. In Proceedings of QSIC 2010: the 10th International Conference on Quality Software, Zhangjiajie, China, July 14-15, 2010. IEEE Computer Society, 2010. Copyright by IEEE. (PDF).

TAP 2011, Zurich

Photo: Daniel Gasienica

I have been invited to serve on the Program Committee of TAP 2011, the 5th International Conference on Tests & Proofs, to be held in Zurich, Switzerland, June 30 - July 1, 2011.

The TAP conference is devoted to the convergence of proofs and tests. It combines ideas from both sides for the advancement of software quality.

We had a paper at TAP 2009 on concolic execution of distributed systems (see my conference papers).

To prove the correctness of a program is to demonstrate, through impeccable mathematical techniques, that it has no bugs; to test a program is to run it with the expectation of discovering bugs. The two techniques seem contradictory: if you have proved your program, it's fruitless to comb it for bugs; and if you are testing it, that is surely a sign that you have given up on any hope to prove its correctness.

Accordingly, proofs and tests have, since the onset of software engineering research, been pursued by distinct communities using rather different techniques and tools.

And yet the development of both approaches leads to the discovery of common issues and to the realization that each may need the other. The emergence of model checking has been one of the first signs that contradiction may yield to complementarity, but in the past few years an increasing number of research efforts have encountered the need for combining proofs and tests, dropping earlier dogmatic views of incompatibility and taking instead the best of what each of these software engineering domains has to offer.

The conference will include a mix of invited and submitted presentation, and a generous allocation of panels and informal discussions. All papers will be published in Springer's LNCS series.

ICTAC 2011, Johannesburg

Photo: Axel Bührmann

I have been invited to serve on the Program Committee of ICTAC 2011 to be held in Johannesburg, South Africa from 31 August to 2 September 2011.
ICTAC 2011 is the 8th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing, the latest in a series founded by the International Institute for Software Technology of the United Nations University (UNU-IIST). ICTAC brings together practitioners and researchers to present their research and to exchange ideas and experience addressing challenges in both theoretical aspects of computing and in the exploitation of theory through methods and tools for system development.

SEFM 2011, Montevideo, Uruguay

Photo: Eduardo Amorim

I have been invited to serve on the Program Committee of SEFM 2011, the 9th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2011 will take place in Montevideo, Uruguay, end of November 2011. The PC-chairs are Gilles Barthe and Gerardo Schneider.
The aim of the conference is to bring together practitioners and researchers from academia, industry and government to advance the state of the art in formal methods, to facilitate their uptake in the software industry and to encourage their integration with practical engineering methods. Papers that combine formal methods and software engineering are especially welcome.
I served as a PC-Cochair for SEFM 2005. For information on the past SEFM conferences visit the general SEFM webpage.

SCENARIOS 2011, Berlin

Photo: Ishtar Gate, Pergamon Museum, Berlin 2010.

I have been invited to serve on the Program Committee of SCENARIOS 2011, the 1st international workshop on Scenario-Based Testing . SCENARIOS 2011 is a satellite worksop of ICST 2011 to be held in Berlin, Germany, March 2011.

Nowadays, more and more techniques rely on human intervention so as to ensure the applicability of testing approaches. Indeed, a trade-off has to be found between the relevance of the test cases (requiring strong human intervention) and automation. Scenario-Based Testing addresses this issue by looking for more automation, with human intervention restricted to insightful activities. Over the years, different scenario based testing techniques have been developed to assist the validation engineer, using textual scenarios such as regular expressions, graphical notations such as UML interaction diagrams or test purposes specified as transitions systems. All these techniques represent an efficient solution to the state space explosion problem by restricting the possible executions of the system to a limited, and hopefully more accurate, subset of admissible traces. In addition, they make it possible to capture the human expertise for testing specific situations that can not be targeted by a systematic model coverage approach.

This first edition of the workshop on Scenario-Based Testing aims at gathering ideas and techniques in the area of semi-automated testing. It is intended to assess the effectiveness of available techniques and promote original research ideas that can be concretized into an industrial context.

MBT 2011, April 2-3, 2011, Saarbruecken, Germany

Photo: Wolfgang Staudt

I have been invited to serve on the Program Committee of MBT 2011, the 7th Workshop on Model-Based Testing. MBT 2011 is a satellite worksop of ETAPS 2011 to be held in Saarbrücken, Germany.

The workshop is devoted to model-based testing of both software and hardware. Model-based testing is closely related to model-based specification. Models are used to describe the behavior of the system under consideration and to guide such efforts as test selection and test results evaluation. Both testing and verification are used to validate models against the requirements and check that the implementation conforms to the specification model.

Model-based testing has gained attention with the popularization of models in software/hardware design and development. Of particular importance are formal models with precise semantics, such as state-based formalisms. Testing with such models allows one to measure the degree of the product's conformance with the model.

Techniques to support model-based testing are drawn from diverse areas, like formal verification, model checking, control and data flow analysis, grammar analysis, and Markov decision processes.

The intent of this workshop is to bring together researchers and users of models for to discuss the state of the art in theory, applications, tools, and industrialization of model-based specification, testing and verification.

Original submissions are solicited from industry and academia. They are invited to present their work, plans, and views related to model-based testing. The topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Online and offline test sequence generation methods and tools
• Test data selection methods and tools
• Runtime verification
• Model-based test coverage metrics
• Automatic domain/partition analysis
• Combination of verification and testing
• Models as test oracles
• Scenario based test generation
• Meta programming support for testing
• Formalisms suitable for model-based testing
• Application of model checking techniques in model-based testing
• Game-theoretic approaches to testing
• Model-based testing in industry: problems and achievements

ICFEM 2010, Nov 16-19, Shangai

Photo: Wolfgang Staudt

Another Shanghai conference I have been invited to serve on the Program Committee: ICFEM 2010, the 12th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods. ICFEM 2010 will take place in Shanghai, right after UTP 2010. Submission deadline for abstracts is 28th of May 2010. The conference chair is my former colleague at UNU-IIST He Jifeng (East China Normal University, China), PC-cochairs are Jin Song Dong (National University of Singapore, Singapore) and Huibiao Zhu (East China Normal University, China).

ICFEM brings together those interested in the application of formal engineering methods to computer systems. Researchers and practitioners, from industry, academia, and government, are encouraged to attend, and to help advance the state of the art. We are interested in work that has been incorporated into real production systems, and in theoretical work that promises to bring practical, tangible benefit.

Submissions related to the following principal themes are encouraged, but any topics relevant to the field of formal methods and their support environments will also be considered:

• Formal model-based development and code generation
• Abstraction and refinement
• Formal specification and modelling
• Software verification
• Formal approaches to software testing
• Software model checking
• Formal methods for object and component systems
• Analysis and models for concurrency
• Formal methods for cloud computing
• Tool development and integration
• Software safety, security and reliability
• Experiments involving verified systems
• Applications of formal methods

UTP 2010, Nov 15-16, Shanghai

Photo: stevechasmar

I have been invited to serve on the Program Committee of UTP 2010, the 3rd International Symposium on Unifying Theories of Programming. UTP 2010 will take place in Shanghai. Submission deadline for abstracts is 4th of June 2010. The PC-chair is Shengchao Qin, University of Durham, UK.

Based on the pioneering work on Unifying Theories of Programming by Tony Hoare, He Jifeng, and others, the aims of the UTP Symposium series are to continue to reaffirm the significance of the ongoing UTP project, to encourage efforts to advance it by providing a focus for the sharing of results by those already actively contributing, and to raise awareness of the benefits of such unifying theoretical frameworks among the wider computer science and software engineering communities.

Of particular interest is how unification may be used to meet the goals and difficulties to be encountered in the Grand Challenges of Computing, with particular reference to the UK's "GC6: Dependable Systems Evolution", its international cousin the "Verified Software Initiative", and their plan to develop a Verified Software Repository. To this end the UTP2010 Symposium welcomes contributions on the above themes as well as others which can be related to them. Such additional themes include, but are not limited to, relational semantics, relational algebra, healthiness conditions, normal forms, linkage of theories, algebraic descriptions, incorporation of probabilistic programming, timed calculi and object-based descriptions, as well as alternative programming paradigms such as functional, logical, data-flow, and beyond. In all cases, the UTP approach should be compared and advantages/disadvantages discussed.

SEFM 2010, 13-17 September, Pisa, Italy

Photo: Pisa 2007

I have been invited to serve on the Program Committee of SEFM 2010, the 8th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2010 will take place in Pisa. Submission deadline for abstracts is 22 March 2010. The PC-chairs are Jose Luis Fiadeiro and Stefania Gnesi.

The aim of the conference is to bring together practitioners and researchers from academia, industry and government to advance the state of the art in formal methods, to facilitate their uptake in the software industry and to encourage their integration with practical engineering methods. Papers that combine formal methods and software engineering are especially welcome.

I served as a PC-Cochair for SEFM 2005. For information on the past SEFM conferences visit the general SEFM webpage.

Here the call for papers will be published as soon as it is out.

MBT 2010, March 21, Paphos, Cyprus

Photo: Grabowski

I have been invited to serve on the Program Committee of MBT 2010, the 6th Workshop on Model-Based Testing. MBT 2010 is a satellite worksop of ETAPS 2010 to be held at Paphos, the birthplace of Aphrodite.

The workshop is devoted to model-based testing of both software and hardware. Model-based testing is closely related to model-based specification. Models are used to describe the behavior of the system under consideration and to guide such efforts as test selection and test results evaluation. Both testing and verification are used to validate models against the requirements and check that the implementation conforms to the specification model.

The call for papers is out. Submission deadline: December 10, 2009

Model-based testing has gained attention with the popularization of models in software/hardware design and development. Of particular importance are formal models with precise semantics, such as state-based formalisms. Testing with such models allows one to measure the degree of the product's conformance with the model.

Techniques to support model-based testing are drawn from diverse areas, like formal verification, model checking, control and data flow analysis, grammar analysis, and Markov decision processes.

The intent of this workshop is to bring together researchers and users of models for to discuss the state of the art in theory, applications, tools, and industrialization of model-based specification, testing and verification.

Original submissions are solicited from industry and academia. They are invited to present their work, plans, and views related to model-based testing. The topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Online and offline test sequence generation methods and tools
• Test data selection methods and tools
• Runtime verification
• Model-based test coverage metrics
• Automatic domain/partition analysis
• Combination of verification and testing
• Models as test oracles
• Scenario based test generation
• Meta programming support for testing
• Formalisms suitable for model-based testing
• Application of model checking techniques in model-based testing
• Game-theoretic approaches to testing
• Model-based testing in industry: problems and achievements

TAP 2010, June 28 - July 2, Malaga, Spain

Photo: Pat McDonald

I have been invited to serve on the Program Committee of TAP 2010, the 4th International Conference on Tests & Proofs.

The TAP conference is devoted to the convergence of proofs and tests. It combines ideas from both sides for the advancement of software quality.

Gordon Fraser, a former colleague of mine at TU Graz, is co-chairing the PC with Angelo Gargantini. The conference chairs are Yuri Gurevich, Microsoft Research, USA and Bertrand Meyer, ETH Zuerich, Switzerland.

Last year, we had a paper at TAP 2009 on concolic execution of distributed systems (see my conference papers).

To prove the correctness of a program is to demonstrate, through impeccable mathematical techniques, that it has no bugs; to test a program is to run it with the expectation of discovering bugs. The two techniques seem contradictory: if you have proved your program, it's fruitless to comb it for bugs; and if you are testing it, that is surely a sign that you have given up on any hope to prove its correctness.

Accordingly, proofs and tests have, since the onset of software engineering research, been pursued by distinct communities using rather different techniques and tools.

And yet the development of both approaches leads to the discovery of common issues and to the realization that each may need the other. The emergence of model checking has been one of the first signs that contradiction may yield to complementarity, but in the past few years an increasing number of research efforts have encountered the need for combining proofs and tests, dropping earlier dogmatic views of incompatibility and taking instead the best of what each of these software engineering domains has to offer.

The conference will include a mix of invited and submitted presentation, and a generous allocation of panels and informal discussions. All papers will be published in Springer's LNCS series.

ICTAC 2010, Sept 1-3, Natal, Brazil

Photo courtesy of Dany Sakugawa

I have been invited to serve on the Program Committee of ICTAC 2010.

It will have a special track on Formal Testing Approaches headed by Marie-Claude Gaudel.

ICTAC 2010 is the 7th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing, the latest in a series founded by the International Institute for Software Technology of the United Nations University (UNU-IIST). ICTAC brings together practitioners and researchers to present their research and to exchange ideas and experience addressing challenges in both theoretical aspects of computing and in the exploitation of theory through methods and tools for system development.

The seventh edition of the event, ICTAC2010, will be held from the 1st to the 3rd of September, 2010, in Natal, Brazil.

ICTAC2010 will invite submissions of research papers of up to 15 pages and of tool papers of up to 6 pages. Research papers should contain original research, and sufficient detail to assess the merits and relevance of the contribution. Submissions reporting on industrial case studies are also welcome. Tool demonstration papers should stress the technical and practical side, illustrating how one can apply the theoretic contributions in practice. The schedule for submission and evaluation of papers is as follows.

Submission of abstracts: 08 March, 2010
Submission deadline: 15 March, 2010
Notification of acceptance: 30 April, 2010
Final version: 16 May, 2010