TAP 2010 4th International Conference on Tests and Proofs July 1-2, 2010, Malaga, Spain http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/tap2010 Part of TOOLS Federated Conferences 2010: TOOLS Europe 2010, SC 2010, ICSMP 2010, TAP 2010 *CALL FOR PAPERS* 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 TAP conference aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working in the converging fields of testing and proving, and will offer a generous allocation of panels and informal discussions. Keynote Speakers: ------------- Michael Ernst, University of Washington, USA Nachi Nagappan, Microsoft Research, USA Topics: ------ Possible topics include (as an indicative rather than exhaustive list): - Generation of test data, oracles, or preambles by deductive techniques such as: o theorem proving, o model checking, o symbolic execution, o 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 Submissions: ----------- We invite two types of contributions: - Research papers: full papers of not more than 16 pages in LNCS format, which have to be original, unpublished and not submitted elsewhere. - Short presentations of work in progress, industrial experience reports and tool demonstrations. An extended abstract of not more than 6 pages is expected and will be reviewed. All papers will be published in Springer's LNCS series. SQJ Special section: ----------- Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers to a special section of the Software Quality Journal (SQJ). Important dates: ------------- * Abstract submission: January 29, 2010 * Paper submission: February 5, 2010 * Notification of acceptance: March 22, 2010 * Camera-ready version due: April 5, 2010 * Conference dates: July 1-2, 2010 Conference Chairs: --------------- Yuri Gurevich, Microsoft Research, USA Bertrand Meyer, ETH Zuerich, Switzerland Program Chairs: --------------- Gordon Fraser, Saarland University, Germany Angelo Gargantini, University of Bergamo, Italy Program Committee: ------------------- Bernhard K. Aichernig, Graz University of Technology, Austria Paul Ammann, George Mason University, USA Bernhard Beckert, University of Koblenz, Germany Dirk Beyer, Simon Fraser University, Canada Koen Claessen, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden John Clark, University of York, UK Catherine Dubois, ENSIIE, Evry, France Carlo Furia, ETH Zuerich, Switzerland Patrice Godefroid, Microsoft Research, USA Martin Gogolla, University of Bremen, Germany Arnaud Gotlieb, IRISA, France Reiner Haehnle, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden Bart Jacobs, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Victor Kuliamin, Russain Academy of Sciences, Russia Karl Meinke, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden Manuel Nunez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain Sam Owre, SRI International, USA Doron Peled, Bar Ilan University, Israel Wolfram Schulte, Microsoft Research, USA Yannis Smaragdakis, University of Massachusetts, USA Assia Touil, Supelec, France T.H. Tse, University of Hong Kong, China Website: ------- http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/tap2010