Call for papers  IWCT 2018
7th International Workshop on Combinatorial Testing

April 13th, 2018, Vasteras, Sweden
https://iwct2018.sba-research.org/

The IWCT2018 is to be held in conjunction with ICST2018 and will focus on *combinatorial testing*. The workshop welcomes both research submissions and industrial experience reports.

Important dates
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Submission deadline: Extended to January 24th, 2018
Author notification: February 19th, 2018
Camera ready version: February 28th, 2018

Submission Guidelines
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*Full and Short Papers*: We invite submissions of high-quality papers presenting original work on both theoretical and practical aspects of combinatorial testing. We accept both full papers (up to 10 pages) and short papers (up to 4 pages).

*Poster Session*: We will also have a poster session, for authors to present their work in an informal and interactive setting. We encourage submissions presenting research work in progress or important conclusions from practical experience.
In particular, we welcome posters focusing on

* experience reports from integration of CT by industrial organizations
* lessons learned from using CT tools in industrial applications

An extended abstract of the poster (up to 2 pages) should be submitted for review by the submission deadline. Accepted poster abstracts will be included in the proceedings.

Proceedings and Best Paper Awards
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o Accepted (full and short) papers as well as extended abstracts will be published in the IEEE Digital Library.
o A call for extended version of IWCT 2018 accepted papers to be included in a journal special issue (in the form a post-workshop publication, independent of the IEEE proceedings) will be announced in the IWCT 2018 website and details will be given during the workshop.
o This edition of IWCT will feature two best paper awards in the categories of "best foundation/modelling paper" and "best CT application paper".

Topics
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Topics of interest for full and short papers include, but are not limited to:

*** Combinatorial testing workflow
o Modeling the input space for CT
o Efficient algorithms to generate t-way test suites, especially involving support of constraints
o Determination of expected system behavior for each test case
o Executing CT test suites
o Combinatorial testing based fault localization
o Implementation of CT with existing testing infrastructures
o Handling changes in test requirements

*** Real-world experience in deployment of combinatorial testing
o Empirical studies and feedback from practical applications of CT
o Evaluation and return of investment metrics to assess the degree of usefulness of CT
o Methodology used for test space modeling and determination of interaction coverage requirements
o Discussion of challenges and open problems in the application of CT in industrial settings

*** Applicability of combinatorial testing
o Comparison and combination of CT with other dynamic verification methods
o Investigation of historical records of failures to determine the kind of CT which may have detected faults
o Combinatorial testing for concurrent and real-time systems
o CT for testing cloud computing systems and use of combinatorial methods in cloud architecture
o Application of CT in other domains, e.g. information security, study of gene regulation and other biotechnology applications, mechanical engineering, etc.
o Combinatorial testing of variability models for software product lines

*** Combinatorial and complementing methods
o Combinatorial analysis of existing test suites
o Test plan reduction and completeness
o CT and coverage metrics – combining the two, and studying the relationship between them

Organization
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Organizing Committee:
- Dimitris Simos, SBA Research, Austria (Program co-chair)
- Rachel Tzoref-Brill, IBM Research, Israel (Program co-chair)
- Angelo Gargantini, University of Bergamo, Italy
- Jacek Czerwonka, Microsoft Research, USA
- George Sherwood, Testcover.com, USA

Steering Committee:
- Raghu Kacker NIST, Gaithersburg, MD USA
- Richard Kuhn NIST, Gaithersburg, MD USA
- Yu Lei Univesity of Texas Arlington, USA
- Itai Segall Nokia Bell Labs, Israel