Published: 14th August 2015
DOI: 10.4204/EPTCS.188
ISSN: 2075-2180

EPTCS 188

Proceedings 11th International Workshop on
Automated Specification and Verification of Web Systems
Oslo, Norway, 23rd June 2015

Edited by: Maurice H. ter Beek and Alberto Lluch Lafuente

Preface
Maurice H. ter Beek and Alberto Lluch Lafuente
1
Invited Presentation: Formal Patterns for Web and Cloud Computing
José Meseguer
4
Invited Presentation: Moving fast with software verification
Dino Distefano
5
A Calculus of Mobility and Communication for Ubiquitous Computing
Nosheen Gul
6
Unlocking Blocked Communicating Processes
Adrian Francalanza, Marco Giunti and António Ravara
23
On Properties of Policy-Based Specifications
Andrea Margheri, Rosario Pugliese and Francesco Tiezzi
33
Domain-specific queries and Web search personalization: some investigations
Van Tien Hoang, Angelo Spognardi, Francesco Tiezzi, Marinella Petrocchi and Rocco De Nicola
51
Semantics-based Automated Web Testing
Hai-Feng Guo, Qing Ouyang and Harvey Siy
59
Using a Machine Learning Approach to Implement and Evaluate Product Line Features
Davide Bacciu, Stefania Gnesi and Laura Semini
75

Preface

These proceedings contain the papers presented at the 11th International Workshop on Automated Specification and Verification of Web Systems (WWV 2015), which was held on 23 June 2015 in Oslo, Norway, co-located with the 20th International Symposium on Formal Methods (FM 2015).

Companies, organisations and institutions offer most of their electronic services as sophisticated web-based applications. Prominent examples include e-business, e-learning, e-government, and e-health services. The increased complexity and the explosive growth of such applications has made their design and implementation a challenging task, not in the least because at the same time quality, accessibility, security, and privacy issues need to be considered. Systematic, formal approaches to their specification and verification are needed to address the problems of those systems by means of automated and effective techniques and tools.

The Workshop on Automated Specification and Verification of Web Systems (WWV) is a yearly interdisciplinary forum for researchers originating from the following areas: declarative, rule-based programming, formal methods, software engineering and web-based systems. WWV fosters the cross-fertilisation and advancement of hybrid methods from such areas. The previous ten WWV workshops have been held in Vienna (2014), Florence (2013), Stockholm (2012), Reykjavik (2011), Vienna (2010), Hagenberg (2009), Siena (2008), Venice (2007), Cyprus (2006), and Valencia (2005).

This year, 12 papers were submitted to the workshop, and the Program Committee decided to accept 6 papers, based on their scientific quality, originality, and relevance to the workshop. Each paper was reviewed by at least three Program Committee members. In addition to presentations of regular papers, this year's workshop included two invited talks, by José Meseguer (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) and Dino Distefano (Queen Mary University, London, UK & Facebook Inc., USA), which we decided to share with a more general audience in two joint sessions together with the 20th International Workshop on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS 2015).

We want to thank the Program Committee members and the additional reviewers for their careful reviewing. We are grateful to the FM workshop chairs and the FM organizers for accepting WWV as a co-located workshop at FM 2015 and for the smooth organization. We thank Manuel Núñez and Matthias Güdemann for their willingness to organize two joint FMICS+WWV sessions. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank Andrei Voronkov for his excellent EasyChair system that automates many of the tasks involved in organizing and chairing a conference. Finally, we thank EPTCS and its editor-in-chief, Rob van Glabbeek, for agreeing to publish the post-proceedings of WWV 2015.

Program Chairs

Program Committee

Additional reviewers

Steering Committee


Formal Patterns for Web and Cloud Computing

José Meseguer (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)

Many web and cloud computing systems are real-time, safety-critical systems with strong qualitative and quantitative formal requirements. They often need to be reflective and adaptive, and may be probabilistic in their algorithms and/or their operating environments. All this makes these systems quite complex and therefore hard to design, build and verify. To drastically reduce such system complexity I propose the use of formal patterns, that is, formally specified solutions to frequently occurring distributed system problems, in particular those used in web and cloud computing, that are generic, executable, and come with strong formal guarantees. I will explain the semantics of such patterns as theory transformations in rewriting logic; and will give a representative collection of useful patterns to ground all the key concepts and show their effectiveness.


Moving fast with software verification

Dino Distefano (Facebook Inc., Cambridge, USA and Queen Mary University of London, UK)

For organisations like Facebook, high quality software is important. However, the pace of change and increasing complexity of modern code makes it difficult to produce error-free software. Available tools are often lacking in helping programmers develop more reliable and secure applications. Formal verification is a technique able to detect software errors statically, before a product is actually shipped. Although this aspect makes this technology very appealing in principle, in practice there have been many difficulties that have hindered the application of software verification in industrial environments. In particular, in an organisation like Facebook where the release cycle is fast compared to more traditional industries, the deployment of formal techniques is highly challenging. In this talk we describe our experience in integrating a verification tool based on static analysis into the software development cycle at Facebook.