[Apologize if you receive multiple copies] Call for Papers TAP: Tests And Proofs 2009 The Third International Conference on Tests And Proofs (TAP) will be held at ETH Zurich, Switzerland on 2 and 3 July 2009. It will be co-located with TOOLS Europe 2009. 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 conference will include a mix of invited and submitted presentation, and a generous allocation of panels and informal discussions 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 Invited speakers ---------------- Boutheina CHETALI Security Labs, Technology & Innovation Gemalto - France Sriram K. Rajamani Microsoft Research India Contributions ------------- Two kinds of contributions are expected: - Research papers: full papers of not more than 14 pages in LNCS format, which have to be original, unpublished and not submitted elsewhere. The research papers proceedings will be published in Springer's LNCS series. - Short presentations of work in progress, industrial experience reports and tool demonstrations. An extended abstract of not more than 3 pages is expected and will be reviewed. The accepted extended abstracts will be made available in supplementary proceedings. They will be presented during the cnference days. Important dates ---------------- * Submission deadline: 15 February 2009 * Notification of acceptance: 22 March 2009 * Submission of final camera-ready version: 15 April 2009 The dates are firm; no extension will be granted. Web site --------- http://tap.ethz.ch/2009