OpenCert 2013 - 7th International Workshop on Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Software Certification

Over the past decade, the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon has had a global impact on the way software systems 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 server, and Moodle LMS are, among many other examples, a testimony to its success and resilience.
However, state-of-the-art OSS, by the very nature of its open, unconventional, distributed development model, makes 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 but also an opportunity and a challenge for rigorous methods in software analysis and engineering.
Moreover, OSS communities are, at heart, learning communities formed by people that share the same values, passion, and interest for software development. From this perspective, OSS is the product of a highly diverse, highly distributed collaboration effort. Looking through the glass, the multifaceted aspects of these dynamically evolving, loosely structured OSS communities require an expansion of the typical certification process, beyond traditional frameworks and towards a multidisciplinary approach that would take into account, not only technical, but also social, psychological, and educational aspects at individual and community level. Such a certification process could potentially increase participation and enhance visibility.
In such a context, following the success of the six previous editions (collocated to ETAPS'07, in Braga, OSS'08, at IFIP WCC, in Milan, ETAPS'09 in York, SEFM 2010 in Pisa, SEFM 2011 in Modevideo, and SEFM 2012 in Thessaloniki respectively), the aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from Academia and Industry who are broadly interested in
the quality assessment of OSS projects, and
metrics, procedures, and tools that could be useful in assessing and qualifying individual participation and collaboration patterns in OSS communities.
Contributions to the workshop are expected to present foundations, methods, tools and case studies that use and possibly integrate technique from different areas such as:
product and process certification
certification standards;
formal modelling;
formal verification: model checking and theorem proving;
reverse engineering;
static analysis, testing and inspection;
safety, security and usability analysis;
language design and evolving systems;
automated source code analyses;
software evolution and reconfigurability;
data mining and text mining;
ontology engineering;
knowledge management;
cloud computing;
analytical models for the OSS development process;
social constructivism in OSS communities;
OSS communities as peer-production models;
collaborative learning and OSS communities;
action research;
empirical studies.