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2nd Int’l Workshop on Variability-intensive Systems Testing, Validation & Verification (VAST@ICST 2012)

Montreal, Canada 21st April 2012  

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WORKSHOP SCOPE

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Variability is key enabler for most systems throughout their development and evolution. Customer demand and continuously changing context (environment, legal and business settings, technology, etc.) call for more flexibility in software engineering. This major trend impacts the whole engineering process, with emerging key paradigms such as Software Product Lines, Service-oriented Systems and Dynamically Adaptive Systems. All these paradigms aim at providing solutions to introduce and manage variability at different stages of the life-cycle. Combinatorial explosion due to variability is a common problem spanning over all these paradigms. 

Testing and verifying variability-intensive systems, thus, becomes a key issue that is gaining increased attention in practice. To date, specific techniques such as combinatorial interaction testing and modular checking have been proposed to tackle it. However, the field is still in its infancy. Although first results showing promising outcomes, they need to be fully developed and their practical applicability has to be demonstrated. The integration and combination of V&V techniques is a possible direction to address the aforementioned challenges. Questions concerning the scalability, quality and usability of the results as well as integration during the overall system lifecycle still have to be answered. Furthermore, being scattered across several communities, some general advances may be difficult to share and spread widely.

The objective of the 2nd International Workshop on VAriability-intensive Systems Testing, Validation and Verification is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners to share their ideas and results and to start discussions on possible synergies and collaborative efforts towards for testing, verification, and validation of variability-intensive systems.

TOPICS (non-exclusive)

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Test Definition (during Domain Engineering / Application Engineering, Problem Space / Solution Space)

Test Generation and Test Selection

Test Oracles

Acceptance Criteria

Assessing Test Quality and Coverage

Test Case and Data Reuse

Testing Processes for Variability-intensive Systems

Model-driven and Model-based Testing

Online Testing and Run-time Verification

Regression Testing and Verification

Variability Formalization for Testing, Validation and Verification (i.e. Compositional and incremental Model Checking)

Variability Space Exploration Strategies: e.g. Incremental vs. Global

Formal Verification (i.e. Model Checking) for Variable Specifications (i.e. Design and Architecture)

Combining V&V and Testing

Variability V&V for Specific Application Areas (dependability, resilience, etc.)

Scalability Issues

Extra-functional Properties (security, performance)

SUBMISSIONS

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Papers can be submitted in the following categories:

Research/Industry papers demonstrating some original ideas and emerging results/tool support. 

Vision/Position papers stating the current state of the art and where the community should go, or early ideas that are not mature enough to be described in a research paper. 

Papers should conform to the two-column IEEE conference publication format and will be published together with the ICST proceedings. Papers should not exceed 8 pages for Research/Industry papers of 4 pages for Vision/Position papers. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three PC Members. Paper should be submitted using Easychair at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vasticst2012 

IMPORTANT DATES

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Research/Industry papers: Jan. 30, 2012 

Vision/Demo papers: Feb. 14, 2012

Notification of acceptance: Feb. 28, 2012

Camera-ready copies: Mar. 15, 2012

Workshop: April 21, 2012

ORGANIZATION

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ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Andreas Metzger, Paluno (The Ruhr Institute for Software Technology), University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Sebastian Oster, Real-Time Systems Lab, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

Vanessa Stricker, Paluno (The Ruhr Institute for Software Technology), University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

STEERING COMMITTEE

Gilles Perrouin, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Namur (FUNDP), Belgium

Patrick Heymans, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Namur (FUNDP), Belgium

Yves le Traon, Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication, University of Luxembourg, Campus Kirchberg, Luxemburg

 

PC MEMBERS

Benoit Baudry, INRIA, France

Franck Chauvel, SINTEF, Norway

Myra Cohen, University of Nebraska, USA

Robert Eschbach, ITK Engineering, Germany

Franck Fleurey, SINTEF, Norway

Arnaud Gotlieb, Certus Verification & Validation Center & Simula Research Lab Oslo, Norway

Sam Guinea, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Mark Harman, Kings College, London, UK

Herman Hartmann, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

John D. McGregor, Clemson University, USA

Mauro Pezzè, University of Lugano, Switzerland

Ina Schäfer, Technical University of Braunschweig

Andy Schürr, TU Darmstadt, Germany

Sergio Segura, University of Seville, Spain

Tim Trew, NDS, The Netherlands

Tanja Vos, University of Valencia, Spain