July 17, 2016

CSTVA 2016

Location: Saarbrücken, Germany

The 7th Workshop on Constraint Solvers in Testing, Verification, and Analysis

Co-located with ISSTA 2016 (opens in new tab)

Proceedings: CEUR-WS Vol. 1639 (opens in new tab).

> The workshop proceedings of the workshop are now available as CEUR-WS Volume 1639.

In the last decade there has been a revolutionary improvement in the efficiency and expressive power of constraint solvers (e.g., SAT, SMT and CP solvers), with a consequent impact on all manner of software engineering applications and research programs. A prime example of this impact is the rapid development and adoption of solver-based symbolic-execution techniques in myriad applications such as test generation, equivalence checking, security, automated exploit construction and fault localization. Black-box use of Boolean SAT solvers for proof-of-concept has been followed by the use of Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers integrating rich theories to treat these applications more thoroughly. An increasing amount of work is focussing on how best to use, tune, or extend solvers to meet the needs of particular applications. A similar theme of deeper integration of solver and application can be seen with ongoing research on Constraint Programming (CP) techniques and their use in software engineering.

The workshop will focus on a broad range of topics where solvers have already made an impact, e.g., symbolic-execution based testing, as well as newer ones where their use is still nascent, e.g., testing of software product lines. The topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Constraint-based analysis of programs and models
  • Constraint-based test input generation
  • Constraint-based exploration of programs and models
  • SMT and CP solvers for testing, verification, analysis, and synthesis
  • SMT and CP solvers and their applications in computer security
  • Programmable SMT and CP solvers
  • Combinations of constraint solvers
  • Constraint programming and software engineering
  • Solvers and software product lines
  • Solvers and fault localization
  • Following a first meeting held with the CP conference in 2006, and subsequent editions held in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014, and the organisation of two workshops gathering researchers from the CP and verification communities, namely CPmeetsCAV 2013 and CPmeetsVerification 2014, the aim of the CSTVA workshop at ISSTA is to bring together researchers in SAT/SMT, CP and software test/analysis in order to raise the awareness of constraint solving in the research community and encourage development of new applications and extensible solvers.

Organization