Preface

摘要

This volume contains the papers accepted for the 14 International Conference on Test and Proofs (TAP 2020), originally to be held during June 22-23, 2020, in Bergen, Norway, as part of Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations (STAF), afederation of some of Europe's leading conferences on software technologies. Due to the outbreak of the corona virus pandemic, STAF and TAP had to be postponed and will be held 2021. The TAP conference promotes research in verification and formal methods that targets the interplay of proofs and testing: the advancement of techniques of each kind and their combination, with the ultimate goal of improving software and system dependability. Research in verification has recently seen a steady convergence of heterogeneous techniques and a synergy between the traditionally distinct areas of testing (and dynamic analysis) and of proving (and static analysis). Formal techniques for counter-example generation based on, for example, symbolic execution, SAT/SMT-solving, or model checking, furnish evidence for the potential of a combination of test and proof. The combination of predicate abstraction with testing-like techniques based on exhaustive enumeration opens the perspective for novel techniques of proving correctness. On the practical side, testing offers cost-effective debugging techniques of specifications or crucial parts of program proofs (such as invariants). Last but not least, testing is indispensable when it comes to the validation of the underlying assumptions of complex system models involving hardware or system environments. Over the years, there is growing acceptance in research communities that testing and proving are complementary rather than mutually exclusive techniques. TAP takes this insight one step further, and puts the spotlight on combinations (understood in a broad sense) of the complementary techniques.