Special Theme Charette Discussion: Integration Testing
Special Session: Business and Industrial Case Studies

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: 20 January 2010
Notification of acceptance: 15 February 2010
Camera ready version: 3 March 2010
Workshop dates: 3-4 May 2010

In software development practice, testing can account for as much as 50% of the total development effort. It is therefore imperative to reduce the cost and improve the effectiveness of software testing by automating the testing process.

In the past decades, a great amount of research effort has been spent on automatic test case generation, automatic test oracles, etc. Test automation is also becoming an important part of software testing practice.

The workshop is the successor of the first four AST workshops held at ICSE 2006 2009. It will provide researchers and practitioners a forum for exchanging ideas, experiences, understanding of the problems, visions for the future, and promising solutions to the problems. The workshop will also provide a platform for researchers and developers to work together to identify the problems in the theory and practice of software test automation, which sets an agenda and lay the foundation for future development.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

The workshop focuses on bridging the gap between the theories and practice of software test automation. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
1) Methodology:
Software test automation in the context of various software development methodologies, such as in model-driven, component-based, agile, test-driven, product-lines, service-oriented, agent-oriented, evolutionary, and aspect-oriented methodologies.
2) Technology Development and Transfer:
Automation of test techniques and methods used in test-related activities, support for software testing methods, and applications to specific types of
software in different application domains.
3) Software Testing Tools and Environments:
Issues in the development, operation, maintenance and evolution of software testing tools and environments.
4) External Confirmation:
Empirical studies and experience reports that evaluate different facets of software test automation and highlight their fundamental trade-offs.
This year, the charette discussion focuses on Integration Testing and submissions on this topic are especially encouraged, but papers on other topics
are also welcome.

CHARETTE DISCUSSION: INTEGRATION TESTING

The workshop continues the successful charette discussions of the previous year focusing on Integration Testing. Integration testing aims to expose faults due to component interactions, such as the mismatch of the interfaces between those components. It can be applied to different integration steps at various granularities.
The discussion sessions provides opportunities for attendees to identify the key aspects of integration testing that are worth research efforts in the near future, to envision the approaches to address these aspects, and to form collaborations to address the identified problems effectively.
BUSINESS AND INDUSTRIAL CASE STUDIES

There will also be an “Business and Industrial Case Studies” session at the workshop, with shorter presentations reporting the real state of the practice in automation of software testing. Test practitioners who are especially encouraged to contribute their experiences and insights on test automation through this session.
Topics for this session include, but are not limited to, the following: new tools, new best practices, process innovations related to test automation, gaps in existing vendor toolsets, ideas and visions for near-term research work.

POSTER SESSION

Posters shall present late-breaking results, works in progress, and challenges associated with automated testing of real world software systems. The poster session helps improve interactions and facilitate networking among attendees. This enables opportunities to engage in deeper discussions of your research.

SUBMISSIONS

Four types of submission are invited: research papers, case study papers, case study presentations, and posters.
Research papers report research and practical experience in the area of software test automation. Both long (8 page) and short (4 page) papers are welcomed.
Submissions in the case study category may be either a short paper with no more than 4 pages, or a slide presentation with no more than 15 slides printed by two slides per page. Case study papers and presentations must report on practical applications of test automation.
All papers submitted to the workshop must be unpublished original work and must not have been submitted anywhere else for publication. The paper submissionsmust be in English and conform to the ACM SIG conference proceedings format.
Posters must be in DIN A0 format. All submissions must be submitted in either PDF or postscript format through online upload to the workshop paper submission website.
All submissions will be reviewed by at least three PC members, but using different criteria. Research papers will be judged on the basis of their
clarity, relevance, originality, and contribution. Case study papers, presentations, and posters will be judged based on their clarity, relevance, and
interest to the workshop attendees.

PUBLICATION OF PAPERS

The accepted workshop papers, including both research and case study papers, will be published in the ICSE 2010 Conference Proceedings Volume II in ACM Digital Library. Workshop attendees will receive a memory stick with both proceedings volumes on it. Slide presentations and posters will be published on the AST 2010 website.
Authors of accepted papers and posters are required to register for the workshop and present their contributions at the workshop in order for their contributions to be published.
Authors of the selected best papers will be invited to extend their papers to be included in a special issue/session of Software Quality Journal, Springer. Each paper in the special issue/session must include at least 30% new technical materials, and its overall quality must meet the standard of the journal.

Workshop Organization

Co-Chairs

Prof. Wing Kwong Chan
City University of Hong Kong
Tat Chee Avenue, Hong Kong

Dr. Christof J. Budnik
Siemens Corporation
Corporate Research
755 College Road East
Princeton, NJ, USA

Prof. Gregory M. Kapfhammer
Department of Computer Science
Allegheny College
Meadville, PA, USA

Steering Committee

Prof. Hong Zhu
Oxford Brookes University, UK

Prof. Shing-chi Cheung
The Hong Kong University of
Science and Technology,
Hong Kong

Dr. Jenny Li
Avaya Research, USA

Prof. Fevzi Belli
Paderborn University, Germany

Prof. Eric Wong
University of Texas at Dallas, USA

Dr. Steve Masticola
Siemens Corporation,
Corporate Research, USA

Please see workshop website for more details and the workshop
(http://www.cs.allegheny.edu/ast2010) Program Committee.

Software Testing Track Site:
http://www.vteOnline.com/ITNG2010/

Conference Proceedings to be published by the IEEE Computer Society

The aim of the ITNG 2010 Software Testing track is to bring together researchers and practitioners in an effort to highlight the state-of- the-art and to present and discuss ideas and experiences to explore new directions for improving software testing theories, technologies, processes, models, tools, and fundamental paradigms. We strongly encourage submissions of both a theoretical and practical nature, from both academia and industry. Suggested areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Software test automation
* Software testing certification
* Software testing metrics
* Software testing quantitative techniques
* Software test driven development
* Agile software testing
* Model based software testing
* Software testing with Open Source tools
* Static code analysis
* Software performance testing
* Software security testing
* Software load and stress testing
* Software code coverage analysis
* Software mutation testing
* Automatic test case generation
* Software testing tools
* Software testing case studies
* Software application UI testing

Paper Submission:

Proceedings will be published by the IEEE Computer Society. Electronic submission in MS Word (.doc) format is required. Papers must represent high quality and previously unpublished work, not currently under review by anotherconference, workshop, or journal.

Interested authors should submit a 3 to 6-page paper of their original and unpublished work, including 5 keywords, using a slightly modified form of the IEEE conference proceedings format. A template is available at:

http://www.vteonline.com/ITNG2010/IEEEPaperTemplateModifiedForITNG.doc

Evaluation Process:

Papers will be evaluated for originality, significance, clarity, and soundness. Per ITNG policy, except for invited papers, all papers will be reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. Accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings published by the IEEE Computer Society and available on the IEEE digital library.

Deadlines:

Submission Deadline: October 23, 2009
Author Notification: December 4, 2009
Camera Ready Paper Due: February 5, 2010

July 23, 2009 (afternoon only)
Co-located with ISSTA 2009
Chicago, IL, USA

Supported by Microsoft Research

** Theme **

Testing is the most widely used approach for validating software, but it is labor-intensive and error-prone. Automated testing has the potential to make testing more cost-effective. A number of recent research approaches to automated testing use state-space exploration techniques including explicit-state model checking, symbolic execution, search-based techniques, heuristic-guided exploration, or a combination of techniques. These approaches can be used in various scenarios such as model checking, model-based testing, code-based test case generation, etc. These approaches are implemented in several tools used in both industry and academia. To improve performance, the tools incorporate different methods for state representation, state comparison, function summaries, etc. Some tools work only with the code under test while others can exploit additional information such as state abstraction, state comparison, existing tests, and oracles.

While state-space exploration for automated testing has already shown promising results, a number of challenges remain on this topic, including how to improve performance of tools, how to scale to larger code, how to get a wider adoption in industry, how to handle more advanced language features, how to reduce false alarms, etc. An important issue is also how to compare various tools and techniques since they are typically implemented on different platforms and evaluated on code chosen in an ad-hoc manner.

** Goal **

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from both industry and academia to identify a set of programs that can be used for comparing various tools and techniques that perform state-space exploration for automated testing. The eventual goal is to build a benchmark suite for comparing SSEAT tools, as discussed at SSEAT 2008.

** Topics **

The topics of this workshop include but are not limited to the techniques and tools that automate testing using:

* Model checking
* Symbolic execution
* Constraint solving
* Random exploration
* Heuristics-based searches
* Genetic algorithms
* Combination of techniques

** Format **

This will be a half-day workshop aimed at identifying a set of programs for comparing various techniques and tools. There will be a small number of short presentations about programs and explicitly allocated time for discussion sessions.

** Submissions **

The organizers invite proposals for presentation at or participation in the workshop, and submission of potential programs for comparison. Please email your proposals to sseat2009@cs.uiuc.edu. The proposal should identify who you are, provide a brief description of your work on or interest in the topics of the workshop, and describe at least one program that you propose to be discussed for inclusion in the benchmark suite. Participation in the workshop will be by invitation only, decided based on the proposals. We expect up to 15 participants.

You are also welcome to discuss potential benchmark programs on the mailing list. The list is currently dormant, but we expect it to become active due to this workshop.

** Dates **

Submissions: open (email organizers if you have questions)
Workshop: Thursday, July 23, 2009

** Organizers **

* Darko Marinov, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
(contact)
* Wolfram Schulte, Microsoft Research, USA
* Nikolai Tillmann, Microsoft Research, USA
* Tao Xie, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

AQuSerM: Advances in Quality of Service Management EDOC 2009 workshop, 31 August – 4 September 2009, Auckland, New Zealand

http://nicta.com.au/research/projects/egov/aquserm09

Papers are solicited for the fourth AQuserM@EDOC event. The workshop concerns advances in QoS-oriented techniques and tools for managing enterprise architectures, encompassing approaches to monitoring, diagnostics, runtime analysis and prediction and adaptation. Model- driven and service-oriented approaches are a special focus of the workshop.

Workshop Goals

Service Level Management (SLM) is the process of managing the Quality of Service (QoS) demanded by clients and offered by providers. In the past, SLM approaches have focused on service contract definition, monitoring and reporting and have typically been handled by enterprise system management toolssuch as Microsoft’s SMS, CA’s Unicenter and Empirix’s OneSight.

However, traditional approaches are inadequate when dealing with complex service-oriented architectures. Service-oriented architectures are compositional, dynamic and often distributed over the internet.
For such architectures, SLM becomes a difficult problem that can no longer be handled by traditional monitoring tools. This is because of the dynamic, flexible, compositional and global natures of SOAs.

This workshop will be concerned with the issues that are important to modern QoS management: the monitoring of widely distributed components, dynamic adaptation strategies and the necessity for more sophisticated prediction and diagnostic analysis techniques. Model- driven approaches to these issues will be a special focus of the workshop.

The workshop shall bring together researchers from academia and industry interested in cutting edge formal and model-based approaches as well as utilizing current standards and middleware to meet the challenges of SLM for the21st century.

Themes

The main theme of the workshop will be QoS-oriented techniques and tools for managing modern enterprise architectures, encompassing approaches to monitoring, diagnostics, runtime analysis, behaviour prediction, adaptation strategies and the interrelation of these issues within SLM.

Special focus will be given to model-driven approaches. The development of standards such as the ISO/IEC QoS Framework, the RM-ODP and the UML Profilefor QoS are intended to form the basis for the design and implementation of QoS management in networked enterprise architectures. A current open question is how best to use these standards within the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) refinement strategy for software development. For example, some authors are advocating the use of MDA to generate platform-specific monitorable implementations from QoS requirements specified in a platform- independentmetamodel.

Topics include, but are not limited to,

QoS support for common enterprise middleware (such as CORBA, J2EE and .NET) Management issues for domain-specific architectures (such as process control architectures built using OPC) Managing complex systems using current industrial monitoring infrastructures and standards (e.g., Microsoft’s WMI and the DMTF’s CIM standard) Component-based approaches to QoS management Formal methods to support SLM Mathematical models for system diagnostics Industrial SLM case studies Model-driven approaches to monitoring, diagnostics, prediction and adaptation Unifying management frameworks

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: 19 June 2009
Paper acceptance notification: 19 July 2009 Camera ready of papers: 3 August 2009

Submissions

Submissions should be 4 to 8 pages long in IEEE Computer Society format andinclude the author’s name, affiliation and contact details.
See the workshop website for submission details:
http://nicta.com.au/research/projects/egov/aquserm09

At least one author of an accepted paper should participate in the workshop.

All accepted papers for the workshop will appear in the IEEE Digital Library. Authors will be invited to extend their papers for a special issue of a leading international journal (this is currently under negotiation).

Workshop Chairs

Liam O’Brien, NICTA (Email: Liam.OBrien ‘ at symbol ‘ nicta.com.au)
Iman Poernomo, King’s College London (Email: iman.poernomo ‘ at symbol ‘ kcl.ac.uk)
Guijun Wang, Boeing Phantom Works (Email: guijun.wang ‘ at symbol ‘pss.Boeing.com)