TAP 2008 The Second International Conference on Tests and Proofs Prato (near Florence), Italy April 9-11, 2008

Invited Speakers: Orna Kupferman (Hebrew University), Elaine Weyuker (AT&T Labs Inc.), Michael Hennell (LDRA Ltd, UK)

Purpose and Scope

The TAP conference is devoted to the convergence of proofs and tests. It combines ideas from both sides for the advancement of software quality.

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
  • theorem proving,
  • model checking,
  • symbolic execution,
  • 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

Proceedings

The proceedings will be published within Springer's LNCS series and they will be available at the conference.

Special Issue

There will be a special issue of the Journal of Automated Reasoning on the topic of TAP. A call for papers will be published during the conference, and participants of TAP 2008 are particularly encouraged to submit a paper to the special issue.

The tentative schedule foresees submission in late summer and publication during 2009. Papers that are based on TAP submissions are welcome, but they need to contain a considerable amount of new material.