Conference Theme: Quality of Evolving Software

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the application of quality assurance techniques to the validation and verification of software systems. As the increasing complexity of these systems is making software testing activities more challenging, a significant body of techniques have been proposed to study, experiment, evaluate, design and test software-intensive systems at each step of their validation and verification. This includes the requirement analysis phase, the software architecture design phase, the functional specification and coding design, the unit testing phase, the integration phase, the acceptance testing phase, and the maintenance phase. Since 2000, the International Conference on Quality Software (QSIC) aims at gathering researchers and industry practioner to improve quality assurance techniques and to innovate in the more general area of software validation and verification. This year, following its long-term tradition, the 13th International Conference on Quality Software (QSIC 2013) will be held in Nanjing, China, from July 29-30, 2013 to emphasize different aspects of software quality assurance.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

Software Testing: testing theory, test automation, test case generation, test oracle, mutation testing, security testing, fuzz testing, regression testing, code-based and model-based testing, constraint-based testing, random and statistical testing, conformance testing, web testing, test processes and standards, testing strategies, symbolic execution, dynamic analysis, testing tools, etc.
Software Quality: management, measurement, inspection, design for testability, etc.
Debugging: fault localization, bug finding, code review, etc.
Formal methods: static analysis, model checking, proof-based systems, verification techniques combining proofs and tests, etc.
Emerging topics: testing in multi-core environments, testing of cloud-based applications, knowledge-based systems, etc.

Submission and Evaluation

We are seeking original papers (not published or submitted elsewhere), written exclusively in English, including the title of the paper, the name and affiliation of each author, an up to 150-word abstract, and up to 8 keywords. We will accept four types of submissions: either technical paper for the research-track session of the Conference or experience reports and practice-oriented papers to the Software Quality in Practice (SQiP) industry-track, either long (10 pages) or short papers (4 pages). In any case, papers must not exceed 10 pages, including the bibliography and appendix; papers that do not respect this requirement will be automatically rejected.
Submissions must be formatted according to the IEEE CS proceedings format (8.5" x 11" two-column format). Templates and instructions can be downloaded from the IEEE Computer Society Press [http://www.computer.org/portal/web/cscps/submission]. Papers (properly formatted in IEEE CS proceedings format) must not exceed the size limits specified above.

All submitted papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the QSIC 2013 Program Committee. Submissions will be made through the EasyChair on-line submission system.
Accepted papers will be published by the IEEE Computer Society. Each paper accepted must be presented by one of the co-authors. Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit the extended version of the paper to a special issue of a journal (under negotiation). Invited submissions must extend their contributions extensively in addition to the original work. All invited papers will be reviewed by a separate panel of reviewers to meet the standards of the journal.

Important Dates

Technical Papers Submission: April 5 2013
Industry Papers (SQiP) Submission: April 5 2013
Notification of Acceptance: May 27 2013
Conference: July 29-30 2013