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News

Registration is open. Early registration (opens in new tab) ends on 2009-06-19. Register now!
Program is online. (2009-06-05)

Program

9:00-10:30   Keynote

Bill Pugh. Defects that matter: Lessons from the Trenches

“As part of the talk, I’ll summarize the May 2009 FindBugs fixit in which 700 engineers at Google looked at 4,000 FindBugs warnings on Google’s java codebase. 300 of the engineers supplied a total of more than 9,000 classifications of issues, and more than 80% of the classifications were should fix or must fix. More than 1,500 of the issues were removed from Google’s code base over several days. I’ll talk about how we designed and conducted the fixit, and what we expected and learned about cost effective removal of defects at Google.” read the full abstract… (opens in new tab)

To find out more about the creator of FindBugs and five-time JavaOne rock star, visit Bill Pugh’s homepage (opens in new tab). 

10:30-11:00   Coffee Break

11:00-12:30   Empirical Studies

Wes Masri, Rawad Abou-Assi, Marwa El-Ghali and Nour AL-Fatairi. An Empirical Study of the Factors that Reduce the Effectiveness of Coverage-based Fault Localization

Thomas Panas and Daniel Quinlan. Techniques for Software Quality Analysis of Binaries: Applied to Windows and Linux

Nathaniel Ayewah and Bill Pugh. Using Checklists to Review Static Analysis Warnings

Prasanth Anbalagan and Mladen Vouk. “Days of the Week” Effect in Predicting the Time taken to Fix Defects [Short Paper]

(Regular paper = 25 minutes. Short paper = 15 minutes)

12:30-14:00   Lunch Break

14:00-15:30   “Unconference”

More details soon.

15:30-16:00   Coffee Break

16:00-17:30   Program Analysis

Cristina Cifuentes, Christian Hoermann, Nathan Keynes, Lian Li, Simon Long, Erica Mealy, Michael Mounteney and Bernhard Scholz. BegBunch — Benchmarking for C Bug Detection Tools

Ian Darwin. AnnaBot: A Static Verifier for Java Annotation Usages

Daryl Shannon, Indradeep Ghosh, Sree Rajan and Sarfraz Khurshid. Efficient Symbolic Execution of Strings for Validating Web Applications

Fadi Zaraket and Wes Masri. Property Based Coverage Criterion [Short Paper]

(Regular paper = 25 minutes. Short paper = 15 minutes)

17:30-17:35   Workshop Wrap-up

Call for Papers

Bugs are everywhere in today’s software and because of the huge economic damage they are actively studied by research. In program analysis, researchers develop defect detection tools that identify anomalies in programs and report them as possible defects. Defect localization takes a given failure and identifies the cause of the defect. In empirical software engineering, researchers identify factors that correlate with defects and build prediction models to effectively allocate resources for quality assurance to the parts of the software that need it most. Most of this research is conducted on medium-sized open-source projects and rarely used in industry. In the long-term human and social issues will gain importance when analyzing defects, however, there is only little research in this area so far.

The goal of this one-day workshop is to connect the different research communities with each other and with industry. The workshop will provide a forum for researchers as well as practitioners to discuss issues related to all aspects of bugs. Researchers can present their tools and techniques and make them accessible to industry. Participants from industry can share their experiences and help identifying new and promising research directions.

Papers may address issues along the general themes, including but not limited to the following:

• Techniques to detect, locate, or predict defects
• Evaluation and comparison of techniques and models related to defects
• Empirical studies of defects
• Types of defects that occur in software
• Evolution of defects over time
• Tools for post-deployment defect detection and reporting
• Defect prioritization and presentation
• Prevalence of false positives or benign defects
• Cost models for defects
• Mining information from defect databases and version control archives
• User interface issues for defect tools
• Experience using certain techniques to identify or predict defects
• Human and social issues related to defects

We expect the workshop to be a forum for exploratory work as well as continuing work. The workshop will also cover a broad range of topics and thus be an ideal venue for newcomers to research on defects. Also we expect several practitioners from industry and hope to foster collaboration between academia and industry.

Accepted papers will be included in the DEFECTS proceedings published in the ACM Digital Library.

Submissions

For presentation at the workshop, we will solicit three kinds of submissions:

• Short papers (2 pages) will be expected to discuss controversial issues in the field, or describe interesting or thought-provoking ideas that are not yet fully developed.
• Research papers (5 pages) will be expected to describe new research results and have a higher degree of technical rigor than short papers.
• Experience papers (5 pages) should describe case studies in an industrial setting or provide a critical discussion of experiences gained in software development projects.

Papers must follow the ACM conference format (opens in new tab) and must not exceed the page limits mentioned above, including figures and references. All submissions must be in English. Papers must be submitted electronically, in PDF format, using the submission site (opens in new tab) hosted by EasyChair.

Three members of the program committee will review each submission and select the papers to be presented at the workshop.

It is the desire of the organizers that discussion of research at the workshop does not preclude publication of closely related material at conferences or journals. Authors of accepted papers will be able to choose an “abstract only” option, where only the abstract of the paper will be published in the workshop proceedings.