30 January 2013

Christina Thorpe and Anthony Ventresque are organising the 1st International Workshop on Testing The Cloud (TTC 2013) at ISSTA next July.

Cloud computing is everywhere, inevitable: originally a layered abstraction of an heterogeneous environment, it has become the paradigm of a large-scale data-oriented system. And while it has some interesting features (easy deployment of applications, resiliency, security, performance, scalability, elasticity, etc.), testing its robustness and its reliability is a major challenge. The Cloud is an intricate collection of interconnected and virtualised computers, connected services, complex service-level agreements. From a testing perspective, the Cloud is then a complex composition of complex systems, and one can wonder whether anything like a global testing is possible? But if the answer is no, what can we conclude from partial tests? The question of testing this large, network-based, dynamic, composition of computers, virtual machines, servers, services, SLAs, seems particularly difficult. And critical for Cloud vendors: customers’ trust is indeed crucial for companies implementing Clouds, and they have to ensure that the system has all the security and performance characteristics the marketing department highlights. This problem is a perfect example of cross concerns between academia and product companies, and it covers a broad range of topics, from software development to code analysis, performance monitoring to formal model for system testing, and so on.

ISSTA, the International Symposium in Software Testing and Analysis, brings together academics, industrial researchers, and practitioners to exchange new ideas, problems, and experience on how to analyze and test software systems. ISSTA 2013 will be held in Lugano, Switzerland at the Università della Svizzera italiana (University of Lugano) campus.