Call for Papers

Configuration errors (also known as misconfigurations) have become one of the major causes of system failures, resulting in security vulnerabilities, application outages, and incorrect program executions. Building tools for configuration file support, management, and verification has been an active direction of research. As support for configuration files grows, so too does the scope of their application, for example in domains such as Infrastructure as Code.

The 1st International Workshop on Software Engineering for Infrastructure and Configuration Code (SEConfig) provides a venue for researchers and practitioners to come together and discuss the open challenges in the domain of configurations, broadly interpreted. For example, What new security risks develop in the Infrastructure as Code paradigm, and how can we mitigate these? As the definition of a configuration languages is more dynamic than traditional programming languages, how can our tools automatically adapt? How can we verify the correctness of configurations when some errors manifest at system initialization time, while others only manifest under particular system environments? What is the best way to discover configuration setting recommendations and present them to a developer? The goal of the workshop is to gain clarity and specificity on the current open challenges in the area and understand how techniques from industry and various academic fields (e.g., Software Engineering, Verification, Programming Languages) can come together to advance the community’s solutions.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Infrastructure and configuration code maintenance and evolution
• Specification learning and mining for configurations
• Infrastructure and Configuration testing and verification
• Infrastructure as Code and configuration repair
• Analysis of configuration usage patterns
• Analysis of configuration failure patterns
• New languages for configuration

Submission Information

SEConfig invites extended abstracts/short research papers, practice papers and experience reports, position and vision papers. All kinds of papers will be two to four (2–4) pages long. Extended abstracts (2 pages) and short research papers (4 pages) present on-going work where authors want to start a discussion and receive feedback from the community. Practice papers and experience reports (2–4 pages) provide insight intro problems and challenges faced in practice with possible steps for resolution and a call for further examination and discussion within the workshop. Position and vision papers (2–4 pages) formulate a higher level perspective and present potential directions of the field.

All submissions should be made through EasyChair

Overlap with previously published work should be indicated, but does not disqualify a submission if the presentation can be expected to be of enough interest. Submissions will be included, at the authors discretion, in published workshop proceedings following the workshop. Submissions do not need to be double-blinded, but should otherwise follow the general formatting guidelines.

Important Dates

Submissions due

July 30th 2019

Notification to authors

August 12th 2019

Camera-ready copies due

September 16th 2019