CFP Guide

The Automated Testing Summit (ATS) is a new technical conference for companies and developers doing automated testing of Open Source products, particularly Linux-based products and services. It is dedicated to sharing knowledge, techniques, and standards for Open Source Quality Assurance. The main organizer of ATS is the KernelCI Project of the Linux Foundation.

Please be aware that the Linux Foundation will now utilize Sessionize for CFP submissions. Sessionize is a cloud-based event content management software designed to be intuitive and user-friendly. If you need guidance, please review how to submit your session for an event to see step-by-step instructions and helpful screenshots.

Reminder: This is a community conference — so no product and/or vendor sales pitches.

KernelCI and Kernel Testing at Scale

• Advancing the KernelCI ecosystem: architecture, pipelines, and infrastructure
• Test coverage metrics, test result aggregation (KCIDB), and triage workflows
• Integration with maintainers and developers workflows
• Interoperability with kselftest, syzkaller, and other upstream testing tools
• Defining common schemas, APIs, and metadata for test systems

Test Frameworks and Infrastructure

• Integrating test frameworks with CI pipelines
• Designing scalable, distributed lab environments
• Real-world experiences deploying test infrastructure for upstream projects

Reproducibility, Debugging, and Analysis

• Root-causing intermittent or flaky test failures
• Mapping test failures to code changes, kernel versions, and hardware differences
• Test result standardization and interoperability

Fuzzing, Static Analysis, and Code Coverage

• Fuzzing strategies for kernel and low-level software
• Static analysis integration into CI
• Coverage visualization and its role in test planning

CI/CD and DevOps Integration

• Testing workflows in GitLab/GitHub/Jenkins pipelines
• Bridging the gap between upstream and downstream validation
• Integrating automated testing into release engineering

Test Requirements and Safety-Critical Use Cases

• Defining, capturing, and validating test requirements in open systems
• Traceability from requirements to test results
• Supporting safety and certification workflows (e.g., ISO 26262, IEC 61508)
• Approaches to test completeness and coverage justification
• Experiences from safety-critical projects like ELISA or AGL

Performance Testing and Metrics

• Performance testing in real-time and embedded environments
• Strategies for integrating performance testing into automated workflows
• Capturing and analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) such as boot time, memory usage, I/O latency, and CPU utilization
• Detecting and tracking performance regressions over time
• Tools and frameworks for low-level and system-wide performance benchmarking
• Visualization and alerting based on performance trends
• Challenges in reproducibility of performance results across hardware variations

• Session Presentation: 25 minutes
• Session Presentation: 45 minutes
• Birds of a Feather: 45 minutes
• Lightning Talk: 5-10 minutes

• All speakers are required to adhere to our Code of Conduct. We also highly recommend that speakers take our online Inclusive Speaker Orientation Course.
• Panel submissions must include the names of all participants in the initial submission to be considered. In addition, The Linux Foundation does not accept submissions with all-male panels in an effort to increase speaker diversity.
• Complimentary Passes For Speakers – One complimentary pass for the event will be provided for the accepted speaker(s) per submission.
• Avoid sales or marketing pitches and discussing unlicensed or potentially closed-source technologies when preparing your proposal; these talks are almost always rejected due to the fact that they take away from the integrity of our events, and are rarely well-received by conference attendees.
• All accepted speakers are required to submit their slides before the event.

While it is not our intention to provide you with strict instructions on how to prepare your proposal, we hope you will take a moment to review the following guidelines that we have put together to help you prepare the best submission possible. To get started, here are three things that you should consider before submitting your proposal:

1. What are you hoping to get from your presentation?
2. What do you expect the audience to gain from your presentation?
3. How will your presentation help better the ecosystem?

There are plenty of ways to give a presentation about projects and technologies without focusing on company-specific efforts. Remember the things to consider that we mentioned above when writing your proposal and think of ways to make it interesting for attendees while still letting you share your experiences, educate the community about an issue, or generate interest in a project.

How to Give a Great Talk

We want to ensure submitters receive resources to help put together a great submission and, if accepted, give the best presentation possible. To help do this, we recommend viewing seasoned speaker Dawn Foster’s in-depth session titled Overcoming Imposter Syndrome to Become a Conference Speaker!.

Have More Questions? First Time Submitting? Don’t Feel Intimidated

Linux Foundation events are an excellent way to get to know the community and share your ideas and the work you are doing, and we strongly encourage first-time speakers to submit talks for our events. If you aren’t sure about your abstract, reach out to us, and we will be more than happy to work with you on your proposal.

The Linux Foundation and its project communities are dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for participants at all of our events. We encourage all submitters to review our complete Code of Conduct.