2018 IEEE/ACM 13th International Workshop on Automation of Software Test AST

活动简介

In software development practice, testing accounts for as much as 50% of the total development effort.
It is therefore imperative to reduce the cost and improve the effectiveness of software testing by automating the testing process. In the past decades, a great amount of research effort has been spent on automatic test case generation, automatic test selection, automatic test oracles, etc. and there has been a rapid growth of practices in using automated software testing tools.

The practice of software test automation (TA) has also moved forward significantly in the past few years, from what was just recording manual testing activities and replaying recorded test scripts for regression testing to systematically (but still manually) developing test code that is executed in some framework of TA tools, such as JUnit. A large number of software test tools have been developed and become available on the market. However, progress in TA is still required.

AST 2018 is the 13th edition of the ICSE workshop series since its establishment in 2006, and its subject of test automation remains still relevant and actively studied. Authors are invited to submit their original work on topics including, but not limited to, the methodology, technology development and transfer, software tools and environments, and experience reports related to software test automation.

征稿信息

The workshop focuses on bridging the gap between the theory and practice of software test automation.
The general theme of the workshop is automation of software test. The topics cover all aspects related to software TA, including but not limited to:

Methodology: Software test automation in the context of various software development methodologies.
Technology: Automation of various test techniques and methods for testing related activities, as well as for testing various types of software applications.
Tools and environments: Issues in the development, operation, maintenance and evolution of software testing tools and environments, and their integration and inter-operation with other types of software development and maintenance tools and runtime support environments and platforms.
Experiments, empirical studies and experience reports: Experiments, empirical studies of software test automation, as well as reports on real experiences in using automated testing techniques, methods and tools in industry.
Identification of problems and visions of the future: The identification of problems that hamper wider adoption of automated test techniques, methods and tools and the analysis and specification of the requirements on automated software testing.

In addition to the general themes and topics, AST 2018 focuses on the special theme of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for TA and TA for AI/Machine Learning (ML) software.
AI/ML has recently gained much attention from both research and practice community with the heated talks on self-driving cars, robot controlled Amazon warehouse, as well as Microsoft’s AI programmer.
TA has the need to catch up by developing technologies to test such human-machine heterogeneous systems, as well as applying such technologies in TA.

To keep up with recent surge in research and practice interests in AI/ML, it is timely to review the current practices and understand the challenges confronting practitioners for the testing of AI/ML software.