Call for Papers

The emergence of software systems in the domain of safety-critical systems requires enhanced software quality control techniques.

Software quality, in general, is a broad concept that has many manifestations, being explored in multiple fields such as software reliability, software security, software testing, software maintenance, etc.  Even though it has multiple ramifications of concerns, the common objective for software quality techniques remains the same: prevention, detection, and mitigation of faults. Yet, the concept of faults, despite its importance, is marked by considerable confusion. The terminology and the understanding of faults in the state of practice and in the state of art are not coherent. Among the existing concerns, the aspect of how faults can be grouped and how they relate to each other, conceptually and from a diagnostic and solution perspective differs.

Furthermore, looking at the hardware-software dynamic interactions within systems,  there is a considerable gap on the separate views of faults: from the hardware and from the software perspective together with their interactions. This difference has strong implications on the quality of systems and the quality of interconnected systems of systems as well. In particular, hardware vulnerabilities and unintended faults can be exploited by software intended faults for triggering a chain of malicious failures within a system and across connected systems of systems.  

We target specific reliability issues of (intended) software faults, hardware faults and vulnerabilities, defects, anomalies or bugs, for a wide variety of industries and types of systems with the goal of identifying similarities, differences in processes, categorizations, diagnostics and solutions. A possible starting theme would be the run-time fault prediction or runtime crashes of operational systems, and relate the identified faults to design, implementation, and methodological flaws.

As part of this edition, we will continue to put a special emphasis on how emerging technologies such as those based on artificial intelligence, different learning methods such as Machine, Deep, Reinforcement, supervised and semi-supervised as well as generative methods utilizing large language models (LLMs) or specialist medium or small models. These new techniques can be used to detect faults and predict crashes and system failures, utilizing both automatic fault localizations, automatic program repair and similar techniques. Elevating from the general and well-studied concept of faults and or anomalies in areas like software testing, this edition puts a special attention on automated techniques to aid in faults.

IWSF

We put a special emphasis on how emerging technologies such as those based on artificial intelligence can be used to detect faults and predict crashes and system failures. In addition, while the general concept of faults is well studied in areas like software testing, domain-specific faults have not received as much attention. 

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Relationship between run-time crashes and fault types

• Relationship between faults, defects, anomalies and bugs

• Fault diagnosis techniques across industry sectors

• Fault management processes

• Domain-specific faults

• Artificial intelligence and fault detection and prediction

• Anomaly detection in execution trace/run time logs

• Metrics and measurements, and estimation

• Supporting tools and automation

• Faults in emerging domains such as cloud computing and IoT

• Industry best practices

SHIFT

The main theme is the identification and reporting on malicious and faulty hardware-software interactions of systems, especially in the context of Cyber Physical Systems. The workshop has multiple topics of interest but not restricted to:

•  Fault diagnosis, analysis, detection, and prediction. Especially at the borders of hardware and software. 

• Fault tolerance and resilience of hardware and software systems. 

• Tools and automation for analysis of hardware-software interactions. 

• Dynamic software upgrades in Cyber-Physical Systems (not restricted):

  • • Development of methods for detecting faulty hardware-software interactions. 

    • Development of architectures that mitigate the risks of faulty components (combination of hardware and software)   due to malicious or faulty software. 

    • Compatibility predictions of hardware-software integration. How a system should monitor and detect the introduction of new hardware or software  components.

    • Development of methods that enable discovery of malicious behavior of software components in interaction with virtual entities in a simulated environment.

• Environmental-diversity-based fault tolerance of hardware and software systems

  • • Fault tolerance in the presence of Mandelbugs and ageing-related bugs.

We invite researchers, industrial and business-related submissions, as well as both masters and PhD students. to submit short and long papers, position papers,  new emerging ideas, and posters.

There are five different alternatives for IWSF & SHIFT 2024 Workshop submissions: 

• Full papers - 8 pages (including references)

• Short paper - 4 pages (including references)

• New emerging ideas and Position papers - 4 pages (including references).

• Posters (Option 1, with synopsis/summary) - 2 pages (including references).

• Posters (Option 2, only poster) - late submission (Papers accepted will be invited to add an Option 2 Poster).

All the submissions will be reviewed by members of the IWSF & SHIFT Program Committee. Accepted papers and Poster (Option 1) will be included in the ISSRE Supplemental Proceedings and submitted for publication to IEEE Xplore. Note that Posters (Option 2, late submission, only poster) will not be included in the ISSRE Supplemental Proceedings or IEEE Xplore.

Submissions must adhere to the IEEE Computer Society Format Guidelines as implemented by the following LaTeX/Word templates:

• LaTex Package (ZIP)

• Word Template (DOCX)

Each paper must be submitted as a single Portable Document Format (PDF) file. All fonts must be embedded. We also strongly recommend you print the file and review it for integrity (fonts, symbols, equations etc.) before submitting it. A defective printing of your paper can undermine its chance of success. Please take a note of the following:

• Submissions should not be anonymous.

• Please consider that the abstract will be used by the reviewers to bid on papers. Thus, describe the paper's goals clearly, as well as the means used to achieve them.

• The first page is not a separate page but is a part of the paper (i.e., it has technical material in it). Thus, this page counts toward the total page budget for the paper.

• Symbols and labels used in the graphs should be readable as printed without requiring on-screen magnification.

• Try to limit the file size to less than 15 MB.

A paper must include the title, the name and affiliation of each author, an abstract of up to 150 words, and up to 4 keywords. Papers that exceed the page limits specified, are outside the scope of the symposium, or do not follow the formatting guidelines will be rejected without review.

Authors of accepted papers will have the chance to present their work at the ISSRE 2024 conference. Submission implies the willingness of at least one of the authors to register for the conference and to give the talk on location if the paper is accepted.

Submission link