OpenCert 2012 - 6th International Workshop on Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Software Certification (OpenCert 2012)

Over the past decade, the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon has had a global impact on the way software systems and and software-based services are developed, distributed and deployed. Widely acknowledged benefits of OSS include reliability, low development and maintenance costs, as well as rapid code turnover. Linux distributions, Apache and MySQL serve, among many other examples, as a testimony to its success and resilience.
However, state-of-the-art OSS, by the very nature of its open, unconventional, distributed development model, make software quality assessment, let alone full certification, particularly hard to achieve and raises important challenges both from the technical/methodological and the managerial points of view.
This makes the use of OSS, and, in particular, its integration within complex industrial-strength applications, with stringent security requirements, a risk. And, simultaneously an opportunity and a challenge for rigourous, mathematically based, methods in software analysis and engineering.
In such a context, the aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from academia and industry who are broadly interested in the quality assessment of open source software projects, ultimately leading to the establishment of coherent certification processes, at different levels.
Following the success of the five previous editions (collocated to ETAPS'07, in Braga, OSS'08, at IFIP WCC, in Milan, ETAPS'09 in York, SEFM 2010 in Pisa, and SEFM 2011 in Montevideo, respectively), the workshop will focus on formal methods and model-based techniques that appear promising to facilitate OSS certification. Foundational, methodological and pragmatic issues will be addressed, through both standard technical communications and reports on concrete case-studies and experimental data.
Contributions are expected to foster a broad debate on OSS assessment and certification, integrating techniques and elements from areas as different as
product and process certification
certification standards
formal modelling and verification (model checking and theorem proving)
software quality and reverse engineering
static analysis, testing and inspection
safety, security and usability certification
languages and architectures
software evolution and reconfigurability
automated source code analyses
cloud computing
knowledge management
empirical studies