Goal

The symposium will be held during the main ICST conference. The goal is several-fold: to provide constructive feedback and guidance to doctoral students who are performing their dissertation research in the fields of software testing and verification and validation, to develop a supportive community of researchers and potential collaborators, and to permit students to interact with established researchers and practitioners in the field.

Scope

The symposium will serve both "early" post-qualifier PhD researchers who have some preliminary results as well as ABDs (all but dissertation students) who have at least another six months before their dissertation defense. Each paper will present a research summary, maximum of four pages in the conference style. The first author of the paper will be the student reporting on his/her research. Nevertheless, other co-authors (e.g., his/her advisor's) are allowed. We expect all students of accepted papers to give a short presentation. After the public presentation, the students will receive oral feedback from a panel of researchers/practitioners. The students may also seek advice regarding: the completion of a PhD, how to perform research in testing, how to design and execute empirical research, etc.

Review Process

There will be a screening process based on a short research summary. The following criteria will be considered:

• Quality of the research
• Relevance of the research to software testing, verification and validation
• Quality of the summary, diversity of background, research topic, and approach
• Stage of the research

• The problem to be addressed by the thesis (justify the importance and show that it has not yet been addressed),
• The research hypothesis
• The expected contributions of your dissertation research
• The proposed research approach
• Summary of results to date
• How you plan to evaluate your results and present these to the community

Format

The research summary must conform to the ICST 2012 Format and Submission Guidelines and must be a maximum of four pages. The ICST submission format is two-column IEEE conference publication format( http://www.computer.org/portal/web/cscps/formatting).

All submissions must be in English, and papers must be submitted in PDF format.

Important dates

All submission deadlines are 23:59:59 Samoa (Apia) Time.

How to submit?

Submissions will be handled via EasyChair. To submit, follow this link.

PhD Symposium PC Members

The PC members of ICST 2012 PhD Symposium are the following :

Benoit Baudry at bbaudry@irisa.fr

Aysu Betin-Can at aysu@ii.metu.edu.tr

Ali Mesbah at amesbah@ece.ubc.ca

Jeff Offutt at offutt@gmu.edu

Gregg Rothermel at grother@cse.unl.edu

Richard Torkar at richard.torkar@bth.se

Jeff Voas at jeff.voas@nist.gov

Contact

For any concerns about the PhD Symposium, please contact PhD Symposium chairs :

Natalia Juristo at natalia@fi.upm.es

Vahid Garousi at vgarousi@ucalgary.ca