RV started in 2001 as a workshop, and became a conference in 2010. The objective of the conference is to bring scientists from both academia and industry together to debate on how to monitor, analyze and guide the execution of programs. The ultimate longer term goal is to investigate the use of lightweight formal methods applied during the execution of programs from the following two points of view. On the one hand, to study whether runtime application of formal methods is a viable complement to the traditional methods proving programs correct before their execution, such as model checking and theorem proving. On the other hand, to study whether formality improves traditional ad-hoc monitoring techniques used in performance monitoring, distributed debugging, etc. Dynamic program monitoring and analysis can occur during testing or during operation.

The RV’01 to RV’05 proceedings were published in ENTCS. Since 2006, the RV proceedings have been published in LNCS.

The field covers analysis of single or multiple execution traces for the purpose of:

  • specification-based system monitoring
  • algorithm-based system monitoring (e.g the Eraser data race detection algorithm)
  • computing any data, e.g. statistical information, from traces
  • specification learning/mining from traces
  • trace visualization

Technologies supporting/using these efforts include:

  • program instrumentation, logging
  • combination of static and dynamic analysis
  • fault detection, identification, and recovery (FDIR)