CFP: 6th International Workshop on Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Software Certification (OpenCert 2012)

Over the past decade, the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon has had a global impact on the way software systems and software-based services are developed, distributed and deployed. Widely acknowledged benefits of OSS include reliability, low development and maintenance costs, as well as rapid code turnover. Linux distributions, Apache and MySQL server, among many other examples, as a testimony to its success and resilience. However, state-of-the-art OSS, by the very nature of its open, unconventional, distributed development model, make software quality assessment, let alone full certification, particularly hard to achieve and raises important challenges both from the technical/methodological and the managerial points of view. This makes the use of OSS, and, in particular, its integration within complex industrial-strength applications, with stringent security requirements, a risk but also an opportunity and a challenge for rigorous, mathematically based, methods in software analysis and engineering.

 

In such a context, the aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from academia and industry who are broadly interested in the quality assessment of open source software projects, ultimately leading to the establishment of coherent certification processes, at different levels. Following the success of the five previous editions (collocated to ETAPS'07, in Braga, OSS'08, at IFIP WCC, in Milan, ETAPS'09 in York, SEFM 2010 in Pisa, and SEFM 2011 in Modevideo, respectively), the workshop will focus on formal/systematic/intelligent methods and model-based techniques that appear promising to facilitate OSS certification. Foundational, methodological and pragmatic issues will be addressed, through both standard technical communications and reports on concrete case-studies and experimental data.

 

Contributions are expected to foster a broad debate on OSS assessment and certification, integrating techniques and elements from areas as different as product and process certification certification standards formal modelling and verification (model checking and theorem proving) software quality and reverse engineering static analysis, testing and inspection safety, security and usability certification languages and architectures software evolution and reconfigurability automated source code analyses cloud computing

knowledge management empirical studies

 

 

Paper submission deadline: 13 June, 2012

Notification of acceptance/rejection: 18 July, 2012

Camera-ready copy for pre-proceedings: 8 September, 2012

Camera-ready copy for post-proceedings: 20 October, 2012

Workshop date: 1-2 October, 2012

 

 

Authors are invited to submit, via Easychair English-language research contributions or experience reports.

 

Two kinds of papers are accepted

 

The program committee may reject papers that exceed this length on the grounds of length alone. Submissions have to be prepared using LNCS style. Submitted papers will be refereed for quality, correctness, originality, and relevance. Notification and reviews will be communicated via email. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and included in the workshops proceedings.

 

Accepted regular papers and a selection of accepted short papers will be published after the Symposium by Springer in a volume of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), which will collect contributions to all workshops and symposia co-located with SEFM 2012 (http://www.springer.com/lncs). Condition for inclusion in the post-proceedings is that at least one of the co-authors has presented the paper at the Symposium. Pre-proceedings will be available online before the Symposium.

 

A special issue with selected papers may be planned, depending on the number and quality of submissions.

 

 

Siraj Shaikh

Senior Lecturer

Department of Computing

Faculty of Engineering and Computing

Coventry University

Coventry

CV1 5FB

United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0) 7939 233 995

Email: s.shaikh@coventry.ac.uk

Web:    http://nestor.coventry.ac.uk/~shaikh/

 

Ioannis Stamelos

Associate Professor

Department of Informatics,

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Aristotle University Campus

54124 Thessaloniki, Greece

Tel. +30-2310991910

Fax. +30-2310991911

Email. stamelos@csd.auth.gr

WWW. http://sweng.csd.auth.gr

 

 

Luis Barbosa (University of Minho, Portugal)

Jaap Boender (University of Bologna, Italy)

Alexander Chatzigeorgiou (University of Macedonia, Greece)

Andreas Griesmayer (Imperial College London, United Kingdom)

George Kakarontzas (Technical University of Larissa, Greece)

Panagiotis Katsaros (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece)

Siraj Ahmed Shaikh (Coventry University, United Kingdom) (PC Co-chair)

Diomidis Spinellis (Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece)

Ioannis Stamelos (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece) (PC Co-chair)

Rene Rydhof (Aalborg University, Denmark)