[TYPES/announce] Call for Papers: HotSWUp IV

[Michael Hicks]

[Note to TYPES readers: types/logics for specifying and reasoning about software upgrades are just one way that this community could contribute to this area; submit your new ideas!]

                        CALL FOR PAPERS 


HotSWUp 2012: Fourth Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Upgrades 


                      ICSE 2012 Workshop
                      Zurich, Switzerland
                         June 3, 2012


                   http://www.hotswup.org 


             Submission deadline: February 17, 2012


OBJECTIVES 


Actively-used software systems are upgraded regularly to incorporate bug fixes
and security patches or to keep up with evolving requirements. Whether upgrades
are applied offline or online, they significantly impact the system's 
performance and reliability. Recently-introduced commercial products aim to 
address various aspects of this problem; however, recent studies and a large 
body of anecdotal evidence suggest that upgrades remain failure-prone, tedious, 
and expensive.

The goal of HotSWUp Workshop is to identify cutting-edge research for supporting 
software upgrades that are flexible, efficient, robust, and easy to specify and 
apply. Many diverse research areas are concerned with building large, evolving, 
highly-available systems. In particular, there has been a recent surge of 
interest on software upgrades in all of these areas, as reflected in the recent 
issues of conferences such as ICSE, ICDE, FSE, SIGMOD, OOPSLA, PLDI, SOSP, and 
OSDI. By seeking contributions from both academic researchers and industry 
practitioners, HotSWUp aims to combine novel ideas with experience from 
upgrading real systems.

The aim of HotSWUp is to bring together people from different communities that 
are working on software upgrades, which is the reason for having hosted the 
workshop at different conferences. In the past, HotSWUp has received 
contributions from many of these areas, in particular, from the areas of 
databases, distributed systems, and programming languages. Now, HotSWUp wants 
to actively involve the software engineering community. The present workshop 
aims to build on the successes of HotSWUp'08 (co-located with OOPSLA), 
HotSWUp'09 (OOPSLA), and HotSWUp '11 (ICDE) where the paper presentations and 
lively discussions attracted a diverse audience of researchers.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to: 

- Software engineering / programming language / middleware / operating system
support for software upgrades. 
- Improving the reliability of upgrades (e.g., support for upgrade 
validation and for rollback after failures). 
- Verification methods and tools for software upgrades.
- Software upgrades in product lines.
- Support for system or data restructuring (e.g., evolving APIs, 
changes to database schemas). 
- Identifying dependencies between components and guaranteeing safe 
interactions among mixed versions. 
- Coordinating and disseminating upgrades in large-scale distributed 
systems. 
- Software upgrades and the cloud computing infrastructure. 
- Tools for preparing, testing, and applying software upgrades. 
- Software upgrades in the software maintenance process.
- Human factors in software upgrades (e.g., usability of upgrading 
tools, common operator mistakes). 


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES 


We are interested in papers that address practical as well as 
theoretical aspects of software upgrades from large scale to embedded 
applications. Preferably, submissions should fall into one of the 
following categories: 

- Suggest how a successful approach can be applied in a different context 
(e.g., static dependency analysis applied to distributed-system upgrades). 
- Refute an old assumption about software upgrades (e.g., by presenting 
negative results). 
- Describe a new problem or propose a novel solution to an old problem. 
- Present empirical evidence related to the practical implementation of 
software upgrades. 

Papers must not exceed 5 pages, in IEEE camera-ready format. Templates can be
found at 

http://www.ieee.org/web/publications/pubservices/confpub/AuthorTools
/conferenceTemplates.html

Papers must be submitted electronically at http://www.hotswup.org. 


IMPORTANT DATES 


Paper submissions:              February 17, 2012
Notifications to authors:       March 19, 2012
Camera-ready copies:            March 29, 2012
Workshop date                   June 3, 2012


PROGRAM COMMITTEE 

Don Batory, The University of Texas at Austin
Walter Cazzola, Università degli Studi di Milano
Danny Dig, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (co-organizer)
Michael Hicks, University of Maryland
Bo Nørregaard Jørgensen, University of Southern Denmark 
Julia Lawall, INRIA/LIP6, Paris-Rocquencourt, France
Brice Morin, SINTEF ICT, Oslo, Norway
Iulian Neamtiu, University of California, Riverside
Tien N Nguyen, Iowa State University
Manuel Oriol, ABB Corporate Research
Michael Wahler, ABB Corporate Research (co-organizer, main contact) 
Robert J. Walker, University of Calgary
Pen-Chung Yew, University of Minnesota at Twin Cities


MORE INFORMATION 


Visit the workshop's homepage at: 
http://www.hotswup.org