FIST2023: 2nd International Workshop on the Foundations of Infrastructure Specification and Testing L'Aquila, Italy, March 13-17, 2023

The current IT market is increasingly dominated by the “need for speed”. This need is reflected in the trending use of tactics which shorten the software development cycle and also intermix software development activities with IT operations, a trend commonly referred to as DevOps. As part of the DevOps menu, many practices entail re-using standard tools from software development (e.g., code-versioning, code-revision management, etc.) to manage what is known as Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC). IaC promotes concentrating knowledge and experience of infrastructures within a single commonly available, versionable, trackable and executable source file (literally) rather than traditionally pressuring such knowledge solely on system administrators. IaC covers automations for integration (compiling, testing, etc.), deployment (host procurement and configuration), and more. 

The IaC trend has attracted and is continuing to attract a lot of attention from both academia and industry, warranting for a considerable relevance of the workshop both for theory and practice around the proposed topics. More specifically, academic and industrial studies indicate that looking at automating support to infrastructure code is crucial to obtaining actionable insights, practices, and patterns useful to enhance software development and continuous operation in many possible ways.

This workshop represents both an opportunity for the exploratory depiction of the current state-of-practice along the lines of IaC development and quality assessment as well as a call to action for further work and transfer of theoretical-practical research around IaC from academia towards IaC practitioners in industry. 

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome:

• Notes, position and vision papers (1-3 pages): On-going research, new challenges, emerging trends; tools, novel solutions, new ideas; future research, statements from practitioners.

• Full papers (5-6 pages): Innovative, original research, empirical studies, systematic literature studies, etc.

• Industry and experience papers (3-6 pages): Industrial experience, case studies, challenges, problems, solutions, tools.

Original submissions, not under review elsewhere at the time of submission, will be reviewed by three members of the program committee. A paper submission should comply with IEEE proceedings format. The accepted papers will be published as part of the ICSA 2022 Companion proceedings, and appear in IEEE Xplore Digital Library. Each submission will be reviewed for the aspects related to the statement of the problem, significance of research, related work/literature review, methodology, quality of data or findings, results and conclusion, readability and writing style. Accepted submissions will be presented as short talks or posters at the workshop.

List of Topics

• Infrastructure-as-Code programming practices, e.g., programming model;

• Patterns and methodologies for the integration of IaC processes in software architectures

• Reflexivity and readability of IaC;

• Program understanding and auto-repair;

• Design and operations patterns;

• Testing and test-case generation;

• Interoperability e higher-level languages;

• Code transformations;

• Formal models/analysis;

• Static analysis;

• Code or community smells elaborated in the context of IaC;

• Automated completion and Linting;

• Recommender systems;

• Constraint languages;

• Distributed/decentralized models;

Committees

Program Committee (to be confirmed)

• Lorenzo Blasi (Hewlett-Packard Enterprise);

• Matja Cankar (XLAB)

• Leire Orue-Echevarria (EC, Policy Office)

• Michele Chiari (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)

• Dario Di Nucci (University of Salerno, Italy);

• Stefano Dalla Palma (Tilburg University, The Netherlands);

• Juncal Alonso Ibarra (Tecnalia);

• Indika Kumara (JADS, The Netherlands);

• Tal Liron (RedHat Inc.);

• Matt Rutkowski (IBM Technolabs);

• Akhond Rahman (Auburn University, USA);

• Isac Sacchi (Encora, Brazil);

• Guido Salvaneschi (University of St Gallen, Switz.);

• McIntosh Shane (University of Waterloo, Canada).

• Sofia Sherman (Academic College of Tel Aviv, Israel);

• Andre Van Hoorn (University of Stuttgart, Germany);

• Uwe Zdun (University of Vienna, Austria);      

Organizing committee

• Luciano Baresi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

• Giovanni Quattrocchi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

• Damian A. Tamburri, TU/e - JADS, Netherlands

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to Giovanni Quattrocchi (giovanni.quattrocchi@polimi.it)