Detail

Publication date: 1 de June, 2021

1st Int’l Workshop on Variability-intensive Systems Testing, Validation & Verification

Driven by rising customer demands, continuously changing context conditions (such as legal or business settings), and the wish to leverage existing development assets, the capability of modern software systems to be configurable or reconfigurable is increasing. This leads to software systems which expose a high degree of variability. Over the past years development paradigms that enable engineering and maintaining such high-variability software systems thus have appeared; the most prominent examples being Software Product Line (SPL), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Dynamically Adaptive Systems (DAS). Due to the productivity gains those paradigms promise and due to the powerful ways of handling variability that they offer to application developers, they are gaining popularity in a world where tight schedules and ever changing business needs are the rule.

As for any development paradigm it is of paramount importance to understand how to perform effective and efficient validation and verification (V&V) This becomes is especially challenging for variability-intensive systems. In the case of SPL, one key reason the V&V task is a complex endeavor is because variability exponentially increases the number of tests and checks needed. Furthermore, as SPL V&V activities concern a set of products and/or reusable assets, adequate coverage criteria are needed to establish confidence in the quality of the V&V results. In the SOA case V&V faces a similar – if not worse – complexity problem. Due to the loose coupling and late binding of services, they can be composed to a potentially unbound number of different service-based systems, often not known when the individual service are created. In the DAS case, the situation is similar but special interest is devoted to the runtime issues of V&V.

Initial solutions to handle the high variability during validation and verification have been proposed by various communities, including SPL, SOA, and DAS, but also by more general communities, such as MDD and V&V. This situation makes it difficult to get a global view on key challenges, results and emerging ideas in this area. The main purpose of the VAST workshop is thus to gather researchers working on testing, verification & validation of software product lines, service-based systems and dynamically adaptive systems to discuss novel ideas and understand how they can learn from each other. Ultimately, those discussions could lead to a common research agenda for this discipline.

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