TAP 2016

10th International Conference on Tests & Proofs (TAP 2016)

Co-located with STAF 2016

Important Dates:

• Abstracts: 29 January 2016
• Papers: 5 February 2016
• Notifications: 15 April 2016
• Camera ready versions: 6 May 2016

The TAP conference promotes research in verification and formal methods that targets the interplay of proofs and testing: the advancement of techniques of each kind and their combination, with the ultimate goal of improving software and system dependability.

Dijkstra's famous remark that "testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs" contributed to reinforcing the opinion that program testing and program proving are antithetical techniques. Under the
traditional view, proving aims at establishing correctness, whereas testing aims at uncovering errors: a correct program needs no testing, and there's no point in trying to prove a buggy one. As a result, research in verification has historically been divided into separate communities, with only few interested in both testing and proving.

This attitude has changed significantly over the last decade. Verification research has seen a convergence of heterogeneous techniques and a synergy between traditionally distinct communities. Testing and proving are increasingly seen as complementary rather than mutually exclusive techniques: formal testing can increase the confidence in the correctness of program parts that are hard to reason about formally, and proving can help make testing more efficient and systematic.

The TAP conference aims to promote research in the intersection of testing and proving by bringing together researchers and practitioners from both areas of verification.

Scope & Topics

TAP's scope encompasses many aspects of verification technology, including foundational work, tool development, and empirical research. Its topics of interest center around the connection between proofs (and other static techniques) and testing (and other dynamic techniques). Papers are solicited on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Verification and analysis techniques combining proofs and tests
• Program proving with the aid of testing techniques
• Deductive techniques (theorem proving, model checking, symbolic execution, SMT solving, constraint logic programming, etc.) to support testing: generating testing inputs and oracles, supporting coverage criteria, and so on.
• Program analysis techniques combining static and dynamic analysis
• Specification inference by deductive and dynamic methods
• Testing and runtime analysis of formal specifications
• Model-based testing and verification
• Using model checking to generate test cases
• Testing of verification tools and environments
• Applications of testing and proving to new domains, such as security, configuration management, and language-based techniques
• Bridging the gap between concrete and symbolic reasoning techniques
• Innovative approaches to verification such as crowdsourcing and serious games
• Case studies, tool and framework descriptions, and experience reports about combining tests and proofs

Organization

PC Chairs:

• Bernhard K. Aichernig, Graz University of Technology, Austria
• Carlo A. Furia, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Program Committee:

• Jasmin C. Blanchette, Inria Nancy and MPI Saarbruecken, France and Germany
• Achim D. Brucker, SAP AG, Germany
• Catherine Dubois, ENSIIE, France
• Gordon Fraser, University of Sheffield, UK
• Juan Pablo Galeotti, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Angelo Gargantini, UniversitA! di Bergamo, Italy
• Alain Giorgetti, FEMTO-ST Institute and University of Franche-Comte, France
• Christoph Gladisch, Bosch GmbH, Germany
• Martin Gogolla, University of Bremen, Germany
• Arnaud Gotlieb, Simula Research Laboratory, Norway
• Ashutosh Gupta, Tata Institute, Mumbai, India
• Reiner Haehnle, TU Darmstadt, Germany
• Marieke Huisman, University of Twente, the Netherlands
• Bart Jacobs, KU Leuven, Belgium
• Nikolai Kosmatov, CEA LIST, France
• Laura Kovacs, Chalmers and TU Wien, Sweden and Austria
• Shaoying Liu, Hosei University, Japan
• Panagiotis (Pete) Manolios, Northeastern University, USA
• Karl Meinke, KTH, Sweden
• Brian Nielsen, Aalborg University, Denmark
• Nadia Polikarpova, MIT, USA
• Andrew J. Reynolds, EPFL, Switzerland
• Augusto Sampaio, Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil
• Martina Seidl, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
• Jun Sun, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore
• Nikolai Tillmann, Microsoft, USA
• T. H. Tse, the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• Margus Veanes, Microsoft Research Redmond, USA
• Burkhart Wolff, University of Paris-Sud, France