Software Technology Track: Advances in Software Resilience: New Frontiers in Testing, Verification, Compliance, and Fault-Tolerance Mechanisms

The increasing adoption of software in safety-critical domains such as healthcare, aerospace, robotics, and autonomous vehicles underscores the urgent need for rigorous assurance, verification, and testing methodologies. As these systems grow in scale, adaptivity, and interconnectedness, the challenges of ensuring reliability, correctness, and fault tolerance become more acute. These challenges are compounded by the rise of AI/ML-enabled systems, which introduce dynamic behaviors and evolving requirements into already complex environments.

This minitrack explores the intersection of software verification, safety assurance, fault tolerance, and advanced testing methodologies, with an emphasis on resilient, safety-critical software systems, especially in healthcare (e.g., wearables, health tracking software), aerospace (e.g. flight software, guidance software), government (e.g. military systems), and related technologies (e.g. robotics and autonomous vehicles). We aim to bridge the gap between theoretical research and real-world industrial applications. Our goal is to foster a collaborative dialogue between academia, government, and industry, advancing the state-of-the-art in ensuring safe, robust, resilient, and reliable software systems. Key themes include:

1. Advanced fault detection
2. Software and hardware testing techniques
3. Scalable testing for modern architectures
4. CI/CD pipelines
5. Formal methods and verification
6. Regulatory compliance and standards
7. Advances in testing tools and applications
8. AI-augmented assurance and verification
9. Safety assurance for AI-enhanced and autonomous systems
10. Digital twins for testing software systems
11. Real-world case studies and empirical evaluations in verification, assurance, and testing
12. Emerging challenges and future directions in verification, assurance, and testing

Topics include but are not limited to:
1. Advances in software testing techniques: Innovations in fuzzing, mutation testing, concolic testing, symbolic execution, combinatorial testing, automated test case generation, code coverage analysis, bug triage, test optimization, and prioritization for fault detection.
2. Automated testing frameworks and strategies: Testing solutions for microservices, serverless architectures, embedded systems, wearables, and large-scale distributed, cloud-native, and edge computing systems.
3. Continuous testing in DevOps and CI/CD: Scalable and efficient continuous integration testing techniques and solutions that seamlessly integrate into DevOps pipelines while balancing test coverage and execution time.
4. Performance and resilience testing: Tools and methodologies for stress testing, load testing, performance benchmarking, and resilience metrics in software powering wearables, cyber-physical systems, and high availability systems.
5. Automated fault detection and isolation: Techniques for anomaly detection, automated fault localization, root cause analysis in distributed logs and telemetry, and fault recovery.
6. Lessons learned from large-scale test automation: Success stories, case studies, and lessons from deploying testing frameworks and methodologies in enterprise and mission-critical environments such as healthcare and aerospace.
7. Architectural patterns and reliability engineering: Fault-tolerant design, real-time error detection and recovery, redundancy, failover mechanisms, and robustness strategies for embedded and safety-critical software.
8. Ensuring robustness in constrained and safety-critical systems: Robust design principles for interoperable and resource-constrained devices, handling edge cases, outlier scenarios, and integrating resilience into the development lifecycle.
9. Software assurance and verification methodologies: Development, evaluation, and deployment of methodologies and tools for safety-critical system design, risk assessment, verification, and assurance, including empirical studies and open-source benchmarks.
10. Innovations in formal methods: Scalable approaches to formal verification (e.g., model checking, theorem proving, formal specification) for complex software systems, including automated toolchains integrating formal methods into development workflows.
11. Runtime monitoring and adaptive safety mechanisms: Real-time verification techniques for detecting and mitigating safety violations, ensuring system robustness under dynamic operational conditions.
12. Testing and assurance of AI/ML systems: Frameworks and methodologies for fairness, robustness, explainability, and bias mitigation in AI-powered systems, particularly under adversarial conditions.
13. Verification and regulatory compliance: Approaches for meeting standards (e.g., ISO 26262, DO-178C, FDA guidelines), safety case development, assurance argumentation, and case studies on achieving regulatory compliance.
14. New paradigms in safety-critical system design: Strategies for balancing innovation and safety in fast-evolving industries like autonomous transportation and healthcare wearables, addressing emerging verification and assurance challenges.

We welcome a broad spectrum of contributions, including:
1. Theoretical advances in analytic methodologies.
2. Design and evaluation of novel tools and frameworks for automated software analysis.
3. Empirical studies and benchmarks showcasing the impact of novel techniques.
4. Real-world insights and challenges from deploying advanced solutions.
5. Critical reviews of theoretical advances, practical tools, methodologies, etc.

Important Dates for Paper Submission
June 15, 2025 | 11:59 pm HST: Paper Submission Deadline
August 17, 2025 | 11:59 pm HST: Notification of Acceptance/Rejection
September 22, 2025|11:59 pm HST: Deadline for Authors to Submit Final Manuscript for Publication
October 1, 2025 | 11:59 pm HST: Conference registration deadline for at least one author of each paper

Contacts
Ryan Karl | Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University | rmkarl@sei.cmu.edu
Shen Zhang | Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University | szhang@sei.cmu.edu
Yash Hindka | Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University | yhindka@sei.cmu.edu
Carmen Quatman | Ohio State University | Carmen.Quatman@osumc.edu 
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