[MOBY-l] CFP: Seminar on Testing

[Martin Leucker]

[Apologies if you receive this more than once]

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                           Call for Participation

                        GI/Dagstuhl Research Seminar

                   Model-based Testing of Reactive Systems

                   January 12-15, 2004, Schloss Dagstuhl

                 http://www.it.uu.se/research/project/motres/

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Theme of the seminar

Testing is the primary hardware and software validation technique used by
industry today. Usually, it is ad hoc, error prone, and very expensive. In
recent years, however, many attempts have been made to develop more
sophisticated formal testing methods. But a comprehensive account of the
area of formal testing is missing. The goal of this seminar is to compile
a volume providing an in-depth exposure of this emerging area, especially to
make it easily accessible to new researchers in this field.

Aim of the seminar

The aim of the seminar is to bring together (primarily young) researchers
working in or starting to work in this area (PhD students, postdocs, fresh
PhDs, or maybe even MSc students; also established researchers might apply).
The seminar will be devoted to the assembly of a structured overview (in
terms of presentations and papers) of the state-of-the-art.

Organisation

The organisers will select the participants on the basis of their
application (see below). Selected participants will be approached by the
coordinators and will be assigned a theme, thereby taking into account the
preferences of the applicants as much as possible. The participants will
then write an overview paper (up to 30--40 pages) on the assigned theme,
supervised by the coordinator; the papers listed below form a starting point
for doing so. During the seminar in January 2004 in Dagstuhl, the overview
paper has to be presented (45 minutes) and discussed. Some of the themes
listed below are so large that working on them in a 2-person group is
possible.

The seminar papers written will be collected and published with a German
publisher. In fact, based on the quality of the final papers, a publication
as a tutorial volume in the LNCS series of Springer-Verlag is very likely.
In order to ease the publication process, we strongly encourage the papers
to be written using LaTeX using Springer's lncs style.

In total, we envisage that taking part in the seminar, including the
reading, writing, presenting and travelling, will "cost" at least 5 to 6
weeks of work (full time). Note, however, that esp. for PhD students, this
type of work has to be done anyway, as part of their PhD studies.

Organisers

The seminar is organised by

   * Manfred Broy, Technical University of Munich, Germany
   * Bengt Jonsson Uppsala University, Sweden
   * Joost-Pieter Katoen, University of Twente, Netherlands
   * Martin Leucker, Uppsala University, Sweden, (Coordinator)
   * Alexander Pretschner, Technical University of Munich, Germany

Time and location

The seminar is organised as a GI/Dagstuhl-seminar from January 12, 2004
(Monday, arrival) through January 15, 2004 (Thursday) in the International
Conference and Research Center for Computer Science at Schloss Dagstuhl.
Dagstuhl is located about halfway between Saarbrücken and Trier and is ideally
suited for a research seminar because of its excellent library and special
atmosphere. Registration fee for all participants will be 100 Euro; this
includes accommodation, all meals and coffee/tea breaks. This extremely low
fee is made possible through the sponsorship of the Gesellschaft für
Informatik.

Application

Participants are selected on the basis of a good scientific
qualification.  Participants can apply by sending a short curriculum
vitae (with list of publications) and a letter of reference from a
professor (in case of MSc or PhD students). Also indicate the topics
of your interest! The list of topics can be found on
http://www.it.uu.se/research/project/motres/cfp.html

Applications (including a list of preferred topics) should be sent
electronically (as PS or PDF) by August 30, 2003 to
Martin.Leucker at it.uu.se.

Time table

   * July 01: launch of call for participation
   * August 30: deadline for applications
   * September 15: notification on participation
   * November 2003: first version of seminar paper
   * December 2003: revised versions of seminar paper
   * January 12-15, 2004: Dagstuhl seminar
   * March 2004: final camera-ready seminar papers due
   * Spring 2004: publication of seminar volume

List of theme areas and topics

We will give an detailed account to formal approaches of testing as well as
relations to other validation techniques like model checking.

There are several schools of formal testing. We will give an account to some
of them providing the basis for a comparison. We will show the similarities
and differences in each approach. In general, we concentrate on so-called
black-box testing. In this setting, the system under test is not given
explicitly but may only be analysed using interaction in terms of input and
output actions.

The topics comprise the following areas:

T1: Testing of finite state machines (3 chapters)
T2: Preorder-based testing of labelled transition systems (4 chapters)
T3: Further Model-based testing (3 chapters)
T4: Test generation tools and case studies (2 chapters)
T5: Test execution: TTCN-3 (1 chapter)
T6: Test methods (1 chapter)
T7: Testing of non-deterministic systems (1 chapter)
T8: Model checking and testing (3 chapters)

A detailed list of theme areas and topics can be found on
http://www.it.uu.se/research/project/motres/cfp.html
where furthermore a starting list of references is given.

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Martin Leucker, http://user.it.uu.se/~leucker/   July 01, 2003
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