PhD Symposium

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: 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

Therefore, the summary should include the following issues:

• • 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

The research summary must conform to the ICST 2011 Format and Submission Guidelines and must be a maximum of four pages with main text in 10 point font, including all text, references, appendices, and figures. 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.

How to Submit

In addition to the submission, the student's advisor should email to the Ph.D. symposium chair (see below) a letter of recommendation. The letter must include an assessment of the current status of the thesis research, and the expected date for dissertation submission. Submissions are managed through EasyChair.

Important Dates

• • Deadline for submissions: October 1, 2010

  • Notification of acceptance: November 30, 2010

  • ICST 2011 PhD Symposium: March 2011

PhD Symposium Chair

Gordon Fraser, Saarland University, Germany

Panel Members

TBC