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 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. Elevating from the general and well-studied concept of faults in areas like software testing, this edition puts special attention on domain-specific 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 and practitioners to submit research papers, position papers, experience reports, discussion papers, and ongoing research papers presenting promising work in progress with at least some preliminary results in related topics.

The papers must not exceed the page limit: 

• regular research papers  - 6 pages

• short papers - 4 pages

• position papers - 2 pages

All papers should be submitted as PDF files following the IEEE two-column proceedings format. Papers must be written in English and be formatted according to the IEEE authoring guidelines. We recommend that you embed fonts whenever possible to improve portability. We also strongly recommend you print the file and review it for integrity (fonts, symbols, equations, etc.) before submitting it.

Accepted peer-reviewed papers will be included in a supplemental volume of the ISSRE conference proceedings, and published by the IEEE Computer Society on IEEE Xplore

Submission Link