Over the past decade, the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon has had a global
impact on the way software systems and and software-based services are developed,
distributed and deployed. Widely acknowledged benefits of OSS include reliability,
low development and maintenance costs, as well as rapid code turnover. Linux distributions,
Apache and MySQL serve, among many other examples, as a testimony
to its success and resilience.
However, state-of-the-art OSS, by the very nature of its open, unconventional, distributed
development model, make software quality assessment, let alone full certification,
particularly hard to achieve and raises important challenges both from the
technical/methodological and the managerial points of view.
This makes the use of OSS, and, in particular, its integration within complex
industrial-strength applications, with stringent security requirements, a risk. And,
simultaneously an opportunity and a challenge for rigourous, mathematically based,
methods in software analysis and engineering.
In such a context, the aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from
academia and industry who are broadly interested in the quality assessment of open
source software projects, ultimately leading to the establishment of coherent certification
processes, at different levels.
Following the success of the two previous editions (collocated to ETAPS’07, in
Braga, and OSS’08, at IFIP WCC, in Milan, respectively), the workshop will focus
on formal methods and model-based techniques that appear promising to facilitate
OSS certification. Both foundational, methodological and pragmatic issues will be
addressed, through both standard technical communications and reports on concrete
case-studies and experimental data.
Contributions are expected to foster a broad debate on OSS assessment and certification,
integrating techniques and elements from areas as different as
- product and process certification
- certification standards
- formal modelling and verification (model checking and theorem proving)
- software quality and reverse engineering
- static analysis, testing and inspection
- safety and security certification
- language design and evolving systems
- Workshop format and certification
- The one-day workshop will feature invited talks, a pannel discussion and contributed
paper presentations. All contibutions, in the form of either full technical papers
or short position papers, will undergo a peer-review process. All papers should be
written in English and not exceed 10 pages.
- Publication
- Accepted papers will be published in Electronic Communications of the EASST. Publication of selected papers in a journal is currently under negotiation.
- Important dates
- Submission deadline: 9 January, 2009
Acceptance notification: 6 February, 2009
- Where and when
- York, UK – 28 March 2009 –
Satellite Event of ETAPS 2009
- See also
- http://opencert.iist.unu.edu/ for further details, including organising committee, review panel and all updated information