1st Software Testing Benchmark Workshop (TESTBENCH08)
ICST 2008, April 9-11, Lillehammer, Norway

First Software Testing Benchmark Workshop
TESTBENCH'08

Co-located with ICST 2008
First International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation
April 9-11 2008
Lillehammer, Norway

CALL FOR PAPERS

Programme

Motivation and Objectives

A significant and fundamental problem faced by software testing researchers is the difficulty of evaluating and making meaningful comparisons between different testing tools and techniques. Empirical evaluation in the discipline is patchy, frequently inconsistent, and consequently failing to drive progress. Benchmarks have been used successfully in other domains such as databases, computer architecture and information retrieval, and research in the speech recognition and natural language processing domains has been steered by international competitions run on common data sets. These benchmarks have provided a significant impetus for research and helped to define the key challenges.

There is evidence that the time is right for the development of a software testing benchmark. The recent trend in empirical evaluation shows convergence towards a smaller set of systems (arguably "proto-benchmarks"), although the infamous "triangle" program is still much in evidence.

The aim of this workshop is to investigate and establish the development of a central repository of expertise and exemplar systems that can act as a benchmark. Such a benchmark will serve as a catalyst for the development of tools and techniques, provide a basis for their objective evaluation and serve to focus the research in the discipline. A longer term vision is to use the benchmark to run an annual tools and techniques competition at ICST.

The workshop has three objectives:

The workshop will consist of a mixture of formal presentations and working sessions.

Submissions

We solicit contributions from both academia and industry describing experiences, ideas and resources to support the formation of a benchmark for software testing. Participation will be selected on the basis of the submitted material.

Submissions should take the form of short position papers between 2 and 4 pages long in the IEEE Proceedings (8.5 by 11-inch) format. You can get the Word templates and LaTeX files here

Papers will appear online in the IEEE digital library, along with the rest of the proceedings for ICST 2008.

Submissions should be sent by email, preferably in pdf format, to Marc Roper no later than 1st February 2008.

Important Dates

Position paper due:
Notification of acceptance:
Camera Ready Copy:
Deadline for early registration: 		February 1, 2008
February 22, 2008
March 10, 2008
March 10, 2008

Organisers

For More Information

If you have any queries, please contact Marc Roper email: Marc.Roper@cis.strath.ac.uk