[Caml-list] Request to distribute: CFP: 1st International Workshop on Specification-Driven Development Lifecycle (SpecOps 2026) @ SPLASH/ISSTA 2026

[Caml-list] Request to distribute: CFP: 1st International Workshop on Specification-Driven Development Lifecycle (SpecOps 2026) @ SPLASH/ISSTA 2026

[Yangtian Zi]

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Dear mailing list maintainers,

We would be grateful if you could distribute the following call for papers.

Please let me know if any changes are needed to meet the posting guidelines.

Thank you for your time.

Best regards,
Yangtian Zi
Northeastern University
SpecOps 2026 Web Chair


*************************************************************
 1st International Workshop on
 Specification-Driven Development Lifecycle (SpecOps)
                    October 6, 2026

 https://conf.researchr.org/home/splash-issta-2026/specops-2026

  Oakland Marriott City Centre hotel, Oakland, California, USA
*************************************************************

Overview
=========

As software systems grow in complexity and autonomy, the gap between
stakeholder intent and system implementation widens across the entire
development lifecycle. This is a challenge at the heart of modern
software engineering: the specification gap. Requirements are
often informal and scattered, architectural decisions drift over time,
test artifacts only partially capture intent, and legacy codebases
frequently lack reliable ground-truth specifications. Recentering the
Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) around specifications offers a
principled path toward alignment, correctness, and maintainability.

SpecOps 2026 advances a vision of specification-driven SDLC
(Spec-Driven SDLC), where specifications serve as first-class
artifacts spanning requirements, design, implementation, testing,
deployment, and evolution. The workshop explores how foundation
models (e.g., GPT-4, Claude, Codex, Code Llama) and agentic AI
systems can synthesize, refine, validate, and operationalize
specifications from heterogeneous sources -- including natural
language requirements, source code, execution traces, and
architectural models -- while enabling continuous verification
and lifecycle-wide traceability.

Bringing together researchers and practitioners from Software
Engineering, Programming Languages, Formal Methods, and Artificial
Intelligence, SpecOps 2026 aims to foster dialogue on how AI-powered
tools and autonomous agents can transform specifications from static
documentation into living, executable, and lifecycle-spanning drivers
of modern software and AI system development.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:
- Spec-driven development for AI-assisted programming
- Formal/semi-formal specifications for LLM-based systems
- Verification, validation, and alignment of autonomous agents
- Specs as interfaces between humans and AI systems
- Industrial experiences and emerging practice

Important dates
===================
Abstract submission deadline (optional): June 10, 2026
Paper submission deadline (optional):    June 15, 2026
Notification:                            July 15, 2026
Workshop:                                October 6, 2026

Paper submission guidelines
=============================

We invite three types of submissions:

* Full Papers (page limit: 10 pages, including appendix + 2 pages
for references) describing original theoretical or empirical
research, new techniques, methods for emerging systems, in-depth
case studies and industrial experience reports.

* Short Papers (page limit: 4 pages, including appendix + 1 page
for references) that fall into the following categories:
- Short Research Papers: Preliminary results, Vision papers,
  Position papers.
- Tool Demonstration Papers: Descriptions of tools and systems
  with live demos at the workshop.
- Dataset Papers: Descriptions of benchmark datasets and
  evaluation corpora with an associated artifact.

* Extended Abstracts (page limit: 4 pages, including appendix +
1 page for references) that fall into the same categories as
short papers. While the content is the same as short papers,
extended abstracts are not subject to Article Processing Charges
(APCs; see https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen/article-types).

Submissions must adhere to the ACM SIGPLAN style (acmart format
- sigplan subformat, see
http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author/#acmart-format
for detailed instructions) and must be submitted via the
SpecOps 2026 author interface of HotCRP:
https://specops26.hotcrp.com

Submission should be in the two-column proceedings format,
usually following the LaTeX document class acmart with option
sigplan (SIGPLAN/SPLASH-associated) or sigconf
(SIGSOFT/ISSTA-associated). It is recommended to use the review
option when submitting a paper; this option enables line numbers
for easy reference in reviews. All papers (Full research paper,
Short research paper, Tool demonstration paper, Dataset papers)
will undergo a double-blind review process. Author names and
affiliations must not appear in the body of Full Papers, and
self-reference should be avoided and made in the third person.

We welcome both academic and industry contributions and aim to
foster a vibrant discussion at the intersection of software
engineering, programming languages, and AI systems.

We look forward to your submissions and participation!

Organizers
============
Rajdeep Mukherjee, Amazon
Anastasia Mavridou, KBR Inc at NASA Ames Research Center
Saikat Dutta, Cornell University

Program Committee
===================
Jose Pablo Cambronero, Google
Cristina David, University of Bristol
Marie Farrell, The University of Manchester
Alessio Ferrari, CRN-ISTI
Divya Gopinath, KBR Inc at NASA Ames Research Center
Eunsuk Kang, Carnegie Mellon University
Andreas Katis, KBR Inc at NASA Ames Research Center
Martin Kellogg, New Jersey Institute Of Technology
Pascal Kessell, Meta
Pardis Pashakhanloo, Amazon Web Services
Brandon Paulsen, Amazon
Chao Peng, ByteDance
Corina Pasareanu, Amazon Prime Air
Ajitha Rajan, The University of Edinburgh
Baishakhi Ray, Columbia University
Marcel Sousa, University of Oxford
Michele Tufano, Google
He Ye, University College London

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