ISSTA 2020 : International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

Technical Papers

Authors are invited to submit research papers describing original contributions in testing or analysis of computer software. Papers describing original theoretical or empirical research, new techniques, in-depth case studies, infrastructures of testing and analysis methods or tools are welcome.

Experience Papers

Authors are invited to submit experience papers describing a significant experience in applying software testing and analysis methods or tools and should carefully identify and discuss important lessons learned so that other researchers and/or practitioners can benefit from the experience. Of special interest are experience papers that report on industrial applications of software testing and analysis methods or tools.

Reproducibility Studies

ISSTA would like to encourage researchers to reproduce results from previous papers. A reproducibility study must go beyond simply re-implementing an algorithm and/or re-running the artifacts provided by the original paper. It should at the very least apply the approach to new, significantly broadened inputs. Particularly, reproducibility studies are encouraged to target techniques that previously were evaluated only on proprietary subject programs or inputs. A reproducibility study should clearly report on results that the authors were able to reproduce as well as on aspects of the work that were irreproducible. In the latter case, authors are encouraged to make an effort to communicate or collaborate with the original paper’s authors to determine the cause for any observed discrepancies and, if possible, address them (e.g., through minor implementation changes). We explicitly encourage authors to not focus on a single paper/artifact only, but instead to perform a comparative experiment of multiple related approaches.

In particular, reproducibility studies should follow the ACM guidelines on reproducibility (different team, different experimental setup): The measurement can be obtained with stated precision by a different team, a different measuring system, in a different location on multiple trials. For computational experiments, this means that an independent group can obtain the same result using artifacts which they develop completely independently. This means that it is also insufficient to focus on repeatability (i.e., same experiment) alone. Reproducibility Studies will be evaluated according to the following standards:

• Depth and breadth of experiments
• Clarity of writing
• Appropriateness of Conclusions
• Amount of useful, actionable insights
• Availability of artifacts

In particular, we expect reproducibility studies to clearly point out the artifacts the study is built on, and to submit those artifacts to artifact evaluation (see below). Artifacts evaluated positively will be eligible to obtain the highly prestigious badges Results Replicated or Results Reproduced.

Submissions Guildline

Submissions must be original and should not have been published previously or be under consideration for publication while being evaluated for this symposium. Authors are required to adhere to the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the ACM Policy on Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submissions. More details are available at the Submission Policies page.

Research and Experience Papers as well as Reproducibility Studies should be at most 10 pages in length, with at most 2 additional pages for references. The ACM styles have changed recently, and all authors should use the official “2017 ACM Master article template”, as can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template pages.

Latex users should use the “sigconf” option, as well as the “review” (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers) and “anonymous” (omitting author names) options. To that end, the following latex code can be placed at the start of the latex document:

documentclass[sigconf,review, anonymous]{acmart}
acmConference[ISSTA 2020]{ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis}{18–22 July, 2020}{Los Angeles, US}

Submit your papers via the EasyChair ISSTA 2020 submission website.

Double-blind Reviewing

ISSTA 2020 will conduct double-blind reviewing. Submissions should not reveal the identity of the authors in any way. Authors should leave out author names and affiliations from the body of their submission. They should also ensure that any citations to related work by themselves are written in third person, that is, “the prior work of XYZ” as opposed to “our prior work”. More details are available at the Double-Blind Reviewing page. Authors with further questions on double-blind reviewing are encouraged to contact the Program Chair by email.

Supplementary Material

Authors are free to provide supplementary material if that material supports the claims in the paper. Such material may include proofs, experimental results, and/or data sets. This material should be uploaded at the same time as the submission. Any supplementary material must also be anonymized. Reviewers are not required to examine the supplementary material but may refer to it if they would like to find further evidence supporting the claims in the paper.

Reviews and Responses

Reviewing will happen in two phases. In Phase 1, each paper will receive three reviews, followed by an author response. Depending on the response, papers with negative reviews might be rejected early at this point. Other papers will proceed to Phase 2, at which they might receive additional reviews where necessary, to which authors can respond in a second author-response phase.