International Workshop on Defects in Large Software Systems (DEFECTS 2008)
July 20, 2008.
Co-located with ISSTA 2008
Seattle Hilton Hotel,
1301 6th Avenue
Seattle, Washington 98101-2304
USA
International Workshop on Defects in Large Software Systems (DEFECTS 2008)
July 20, 2008.
Co-located with ISSTA 2008 |
|
Defect prediction has always fascinated researchers and practitioners. The promise of being able to predict the future and acting upon that knowledge is hard to resist. Complex models used to perform the predictions and the lack of fair comparisons to what may happen in practice obscure the core assumption that quantitative methods using generic measures can improve upon decisions made by people with intimate knowledge of the project. We consider how defect analysis techniques may be beneficial in a domain-specific context and argue that more explicit and more realistic objectives that address practical questions or further deeper understanding of software quality are needed to realize the full potential of defect modeling. This can be achieved by focusing on issues specific to a particular domain, including the scale of software and of user base, economic, contractual, or regulatory quality requirements, and business models of software providers.
Bugs are everywhere in today's software and because of the huge economic damage they are actively studied by research. In program analysis, researchers develop defect detection tools that identify anomalies in programs and report them as possible defects. Defect localization takes a given failure and identifies the cause of the defect. In empirical software engineering, researchers identify factors that correlate with defects and build prediction models to effectively allocate resources for quality assurance to the parts of the software that need it most. Most of this research is conducted on medium-sized open-source projects and rarely used in industry. In the long-term human and social issues will gain importance when analyzing defects, however, there is only little research in this area so far.
The goal of this one-day workshop is to connect the different research communities with each other and with industry. The workshop will provide a forum for researchers as well as practitioners to discuss issues related to all aspects of bugs. Researchers can present their tools and techniques and make them accessible to industry. Participants from industry can share their experiences and help identifying new and promising research directions.
Papers may address issues along the general themes, including but not limited to the following:
We expect the workshop to be a forum for exploratory work as well as continuing work. The workshop will also cover a broad range of topics and thus be an ideal venue for newcomers to research on defects. Also we expect several practitioners from industry and hope to foster collaboration between academia and industry.
Accepted papers will be included in the ISSTA proceedings. They will also be accessible on this web-page before the workshop to facilitate interaction and discussion between participants.
| Submissions: | Friday, April 11, 2008 by 23:59:59 Apia time |
| Author notification: | |
| Camera-ready copy: | Wednesday, May 28, 2008 |
| Workshop: | Sunday, July 20, 2008 |
All deadlines are strict — no extensions will be given. Submission will be via the submission site hosted by Easychair.
For presentation at the workshop, we will solicit three kinds of submissions:
Papers must follow the ACM conference format and must not exceed the page limits mentioned above, including figures and references. All submissions must be in English. Papers must be submitted electronically, in PDF format, using the submission site hosted by EasyChair.
Three members of the program committee will review each submission and select the papers to be presented at the workshop.
It is the desire of the organizers that discussion of research at the workshop does not preclude publication of closely related material at conferences or journals. Authors of accepted papers will be able to choose an "abstract only" option, where only the abstract of the paper will be published in the workshop proceedings.
The workshop will host a defect challenge allowing researchers to compare their favourite defect detection technique with other approaches, regardless of whether they are static or dynamic. The dataset will include well-known subjects from the Software-artifact Infrastructure Repository (SIR), as well as large open-source projects with defects mined from version archives. Don't miss this chance to show that your approach is the best. More information will be posted soon.
More details on the Defect Challenge.
