Future of Property-Based TestingFPBT 2027

Property-based testing has grown from a niche technique into a recognized discipline with a thriving research community and a considerable base of industrial practitioners. In fact, PBT is only increasing in importance: AI is making software production faster than ever, therefore robust software validation tools like PBT are necessary to ensure that code continues to achieve the goals that humans intend for it.

We would like to take a moment to think carefully about what technical advances the research community should focus on in the coming years, and how we can best bring PBT to the next generation of software developers. The FPBT workshop brings together researchers, practitioners, and educators to address both of these questions.

We divide the idea of the “future” of PBT into two dimensions:

• The Future of PBT Research. The computer science and software engineering landscape is changing rapidly, making tools for software validation more important than ever.

• The Future of PBT Users. Over time, PBT has become more and more mainstream as a part of computer science curricula. As we focus more of our pedagogical effort on software correctness and validation, we will need this educational effort to be both impactful and scalable.

The best version of a PBT workshop integrates these perspectives: technical improvements are often motivated by pedagogical needs, and pedagogy needs to follow the state of the art.

Call for Talk Abstracts

FPBT welcomes talk abstract submissions between 2 and 6 pages on a wide variety of topics, including, but not limited to:

• Position papers on the future of PBT.
• Experience reports on PBT in practice.
• Short technical papers on advances in PBT technology.
• Proposed, enacted, or studied approaches to integrating PBT in the classroom.

To encourage submission of in-progress ideas, abstracts will not be considered archival and will not be published in the ACM Digital Library. While talk abstracts which summarize existing published work will be considered, the expectation is that FPBT will emphasize future concepts. Therefore, we encourage participants to include new content beyond already published work in any submission.

We request that abstracts not be submitted anonymously — review will be conducted in a single-anonymous fashion.

Abstracts should use the PACMPL templates (the same as the POPL proceedings format: acmart-pacmpl-template.tex file with the acmsmall option).

Submissions will be accepted via a HotCRP instance - link to come.

In addition to the main PDF, HotCRP will ask for a shortened talk abstract; the author names, this short description, and the talk title will be posted on the workshop website for accepted talks. The full talk abstracts will not be published on the workshop website to not preclude submission of related work at subsequent venues.