[Om-announce] Tests and Proofs 2009 - Call for Papers

[Tests and Proofs 2009]

(Apologies for multiple copies)


Call for Papers
===============

TAP: Tests And Proofs

The Third International Conference on Tests And Proofs (TAP) will be 
held at ETH Zurich, Switzerland on 2 and 3 July 2009 as part of the 
TOOLS EUROPE week.

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


Purpose and Scope
-----------------
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.


Topics
-------
Possible topics include (as an indicative rather than exhaustive list):

- Generation of test data, oracles, or preambles by deductive techniques 
such as
    * theorem proving,
    * model checking,
    * symbolic execution,
    * constraint logic programming, etc.
- Generation of specifications by deduction
- Verification techniques combining proofs and tests
- Program proving with the aid of testing techniques
- Transfer of concepts from testing to proving (e.g., coverage criteria)
- Automatic bug finding
- Formal frameworks
- Tool descriptions and experience reports
- Case studies


Contributions
-------------
Two kinds of contributions are expected:

- Research papers: full papers of not more than 14 pages
  in LNCS format, which have to be original, unpublished and
  not submitted elsewhere. The research papers proceedings will be
  published in Springer's LNCS series.

- Short presentations of work in progress, industrial
  experience reports and tool demonstrations.  An extended
  abstract of not more than 3 pages is expected and will be
  reviewed. The accepted extended abstracts will be
  made available in supplementary proceedings. They will be
  presented during the conference days.


Important dates
----------------
- Submission deadline: 20 March 2009
- Notification of acceptance: 20 April 2009
- Submission of final camera-ready version: 3 May 2009


Keynote speakers
----------------
- Sriram Rajamani (Microsoft Research)
- Boutheina Chetali (Security Research Group Manager at Gemalto)


Web site
---------
http://tap.ethz.ch