[ecoop-info] VAST 2011 - Deadline for research/industry papers extended to Jan, 4, 2011

[PERROUIN Gilles]

Due to several requests, the deadline for research/industry papers has been extended to Jan, 4, 2011.   

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VAST: 1st Int’l Workshop on Variability-intensive Systems Testing, Validation & Verification (co-located with ICST 2011)

March 21st, 2011 - Berlin, Germany 

Workshop website: http://www.s-cube-network.eu/VAST

Sponsored by:  MOVES (http://moves.vub.ac.be/), S-Cube (http://www.s-cube-network.eu/) and PALUNO (http://paluno.uni-due.de/)

***Motivation/Scope***

Variability is key enabler for most systems throughout their development and evolution. Indeed, customer demands and continuously changing contexts (environment, legal and business settings, technology etc.) ask for more adaptability in software engineering. This major trend impacts the whole engineering process, with key-emerging technologies such as SPL (Software Product Line), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Dynamically Adaptive Systems or AOM (Aspect-Oriented Modelling). All these paradigms aim at providing solutions to introduce and manage variability at different lifecycle stages.

Combinatorial explosion due to variability is a common problem spanning over all these paradigms. Testing and verifying variability intensive systems is an issue that has been studied specifically. To date, some specific techniques have been developed (such as combinatorial interaction testing or modular checking) to contend with such explosion during the verification & validation process.  However the field is still in its infancy. Even if some results have shown first promising outcomes in theory, their practical applicability has still to be demonstrated. The integration/combination of V&V techniques may be investigated to address the aforementioned validation challenge. Questions concerning the scalability, quality and usability of the results, integration during the development lifecycle still have to be answered. Furthermore, scattered across several communities, some general advances may be difficult to share and widespread.

The aims of this workshop are to provide a forum in which practitioners and researchers can share their ideas and results and to establish a common research agenda for testing, verification and validation of variability-intensive systems.

***Topics***

Contributions are expected in all areas of V&V applied to variability-intensive systems. Topics include but are not limited to:

- 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
- Variability Formalization for Model-checking and Verification
- Variability Formalization for Testing and Validation
- Combining Testing and Model-checking
- Model-driven and Model-based based Testing
- Variability Space Exploration Strategies: e.g. Incremental vs Global
- Test Case Reuse
- Testing Processes for Variability-intensive Systems
- Testing @ Runtime  (Online and “in-service” Testing)
- Verification @ Runtime
- Regression Testing and Verification
- Model Checking for Variability
- Scalability Issues
- Compositional and Incremental Checking
- Extra-functional Properties  (security, performance)
- Variability V&V for Specific Application Areas (dependability, resilience, etc.)

***Paper Submission***

Papers can be submitted in the following categories:

- Research/Industry papers: Research papers have to demonstrate some original ideas and emerging results/tool support. They will be evaluated on their technical soundness and how they advance of the current state of the art. Industry papers will typically describe the application of particular techniques on concrete variability-intensive systems. Industry papers will be evaluated regarding the relevance and quality of lessons learned. Not more than 8 pages.

- Vision/Position papers: Position papers state the current state of the art and where the community should go. This is also the venue for early ideas that are not mature enough to be described in a research paper. Not more than 4 pages.

- Demo papers: Demo papers describe a tool addressing V&V for variability-intensive systems. Each paper should present the features/limitation of the tool as well as a case study which will be demonstrated at the workshop in case of acceptance. Not more than 2 pages.

Paper submission is handled via easychair:  http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vast2011

Papers should be submitted in PDF format and conform to the two-column IEEE conference publication format used for the main conference: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/cscps/formatting.

Each paper will be reviewed by at least three PC Members. Accepted papers will be published by the IEEE Computer Society in the IEEE Digital Library.

***Important Dates***

Extended submission deadline for Research/Industry papers: Jan. 4, 2011
Submission deadline for Vision/Demo papers: Jan. 14, 2011
Notification of acceptance: Feb. 1, 2011
Submission deadline for camera-ready copies: Feb. 15, 2011

***Organising Committee***

- Gilles Perrouin, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Namur (FUNDP), Belgium
- Patrick Heymans, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Namur (FUNDP), Belgium
- Andreas Metzger, Paluno (The Ruhr Institute for Software Technology), University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
- Yves le Traon, Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication, University of Luxembourg, Campus Kirchberg, Luxembourg

***Program Committee***

- Vasco Amaral, New University of Lisbon, Portugal
- Benoit Baudry, INRIA, France
- David Benavides, University of Seville, Spain
- Nelly Bencomo, Lancaster University, UK
- Franck Chauvel, Peking University, PR China
- Myra Cohen, University of Nebraska, USA
- Philippe Collet, University of Nice, France
- Elisabetta Di Nitto, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
- Robert Eschbach, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany
- Franck Fleurey, SINTEF Oslo, Norway
- Arnaud Gotlieb, INRIA, France
- Sam Guinea, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
- Herman Hartmann, Synopsis, The Netherlands
- Jacques Klein, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
- Kim Lauenroth, Paluno (Ruhr Institute for Software Technology), University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
- Martin Leucker, University of Lübeck and TUM, Germany 
- Grace Lewis, SEI, USA
- Levi Lucio, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
- John D. McGregor, Clemson University, USA
- Mauro Pezzè, University of Lugano, Switzerland and University of Milano Bicocca, Italy
- Benoit Ries, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
- Romain Rouvoy, University of Lille 1, France
- Julia Rubin, IBM Haifa, Israel
- Antonino Sabetta, SAP Research, France
- Andy Schürr, TU Darmstadt, Germany
- Sergio Segura, University of Seville, Spain
- Alin Stefanescu, University of Pitesti, Romania
- Tim Trew, The Netherlands
- Tanja Vos, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain 
- Engin Uzuncaova, Bing Maps Direction Team, Microsoft, USA

Gilles Perrouin on behalf of VAST co-chairs Patrick Heymans, Andreas Metzger and Yves Le Traon.