This year, the International Conference on Program Comprehension introduces an Industrial Challenge to all attendees. A developer at a leading embedded software design firm has been tasked to fix a high-priority bug in a piece of code his company, RobotControllers.com (not a real company), wrote to control a robot sold by the company myAwesomeRobot.com (not a real company). The robot has been selling like hotcakes, but myAwesomeRobot.com has been getting some complaints that in a certain situations, the robot malfunctions and self-destructs. Obviously myAwesomeRobot.com does not like this kind of attention, so they have insisted that RobotControllers.com supply a fix for the bug by the time ICPC 2011 begins.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to find the bug, fix it, and explain the fix to all stakeholders (the RobotControllers.com quality and assurance support person, the RobotControllers.com salesperson, the myAwesomeRobot.com robot product leader, and the myAwesomeRobot.com CEO) and convince them it will never happen again. In addition, the engineering leadership team at RobotControllers.com would like you to show them what tools/techniques (e.g., software visualization or testing tools) help developers like you to understand the code and fix these bugs more easily. You must demonstrate how you used a new or pre-existing software analysis or testing tool to help diagnose and repair the bug.

You can download the challenge description and the challenge package. The package contains the problematic code (artificially created, but similar in nature to professional embedded software code), developer documentation, bug reports, and sample program executions that exhibit bad behaviour. An acceptance test tool is also included in the challenge package. The challenge description document describes the setting and background of the challenge and lets you know what is required for a valid entry to the ICPC Challenge.

The deadline for entry is May 31, 2011. Winning entries will be chosen by June 10, 2011. We encourage you to submit early and often before May 31, in case we identify any significant deficiencies in your submission that need to be corrected. All acceptable entries will be invited to present a poster of their solution and tool at the ICPC conference, and will have a chance to personally demonstrate their solution and tool to all attendees at the Industrial Challenge session. Good luck!

Submissions must be sent by email to the track co-chairs.

The prize for the Industrial Challenge, an XBox 360 with Kinect, has been sponsored by Microsoft Research.

Industrial Track Chairs:

Jochen Quante, Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany. Email: jochen.quante (at) de.bosch.com

Andrew Begel, Microsoft Research, USA. Email: andrew.begel (at) microsoft.com

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