VAST 2012 - Int’l Workshop on Variability-intensive Systems Testing, Validation & Verification

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
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
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
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. Paper submissions is handled electronically. Further information can be found on the workshop website. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three PC Members.
Important Dates
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
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 Committeee
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