3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automation of Software TestAST 2022

The 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automation of Software Test AST 2022

Software pervasiveness in both industry and digital society, as well as the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are continuously leading to emerging needs from both software producers and consumers where infrastructures, software components, and applications aim to hide their increasing complexity in order to appear more human-centric.

In this context, the potential risk from design errors, poor integrations, and time-consuming engineering phases can result in unreliable solutions that can barely meet their intended objectives. In order to tackle these issues, software testing automation aims at finding solutions to automatically test any concept of software

This discipline has produced noteworthy research in the last decade and AST continues with a long record of international scientific forums on methods and solutions to automate software testing.

This year AST 2022 is focusing on the special theme: “Software Quality and Trustworthy AI”.

For more details, you may have a look at Call for Papers and Submission.

Attending AST 2022

Click here to go to the AST Midspace Room (Detailed information available here).

For any live issues please contact: ast2022@easychair.org

Announcing the winner of the best paper award

It is our pleasure to inform you that the winner of the best paper award is the paper entitled:

Checked Coverage for Test Suite Reduction – Is It Worth the Effort?

by Roxane Koitz-Hristov, Lukas Stracke, and Franz Wotawa

Registration

The registration for AST 2022 can be done through the ICSE 2022 registration system available here:

https://conf.researchr.org/attending/ast-2022/registration

Accepted Papers

Speaker: Michael Felderer

Short bio: Michael Felderer is a professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Innsbruck, Austria and a guest professor at the Department of Software Engineering at the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. His fields of expertise and interest include software testing, AI and software engineering as well as empirical software engineering. His research is performed in close collaboration with companies and directed towards the development and evaluation of efficient and effective methods to improve the quality, trustworthiness and value of industrial software systems and processes. Michael Felderer has co-authored more than 150 publications and recieved 12 best paper awards. He is recognized by the Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) as one of the twenty most active established Software Engineering researchers world-wide in the period 2013 to 2020. For more information, visit his website at mfelderer.at.

Title: Going Online: Reflections on Testing Machine Learning Based Systems

Abstract: Modern smart software-intensive systems in domains like manufacturing, health, or automotive, are data-intensive, autonomous, critical, and enabled by machine-learning-based AI, which poses new quality and trustworthiness challenges. Therefore, new so called online testing approaches are needed, where machine learning components are embedded into a specific application environment and tested in a closed-loop mode in interaction with the application environment. In this talk, we provide an overview of current results and highlight research challenges in this field.

Speaker: John Micco

Short bio: John is a Principal Engineer and Cloud Transformation Architect at VMWare working on Continuous Integration / Delivery for VMWare’s flagship vSphere product line. He has more than 15 years of experience working on CI/CD systems at Mathworks, Google and Netflix. He has given several keynote addresses at industry and academic conferences on Software testing and software engineering. He is one of the organizers of the Google Journal Club - which does monthly reviews of Academic papers on Continuous Integration and software delivery.

Title: CI Optimization Techniques

Abstract: Industrial best practices for Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuously Delivery (CD) are constantly evolving, and the state of the art is advancing quickly across the industry. In this talk I will discuss the best practices that have been implemented by many top software companies across the industry including Google, Netflix and VMWare where I have worked. I will discuss how these systems are being optimized to reduce human and machine resources required to qualify software releases and reduce the risk of latent defects.

Software pervasiveness in both industry and digital society, as well as the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are continuously leading to emerging needs from both software producers and consumers. Infrastructures, software components, and applications aim to hide their increasing complexity in order to appear more human-centric. However, the potential risk from design errors, poor integrations, and time-consuming engineering phases can result in unreliable solutions that can barely meet their intended objectives. In this context, Software Engineering processes keep demanding for the investigation of novel and further refined approaches to Software Quality Assurance (SQA).

Software testing automation is a discipline that has produced noteworthy research in the last decade. The search for solutions to automatically test any concept of software is critical, and it encompasses several areas: from the generation of the test cases, test oracles, test stubs/mocks; through the definition of selection and prioritization criteria; up to the engineering of infrastructures governing the execution of testing sessions locally or remotely in the cloud.

AST continues with a long record of international scientific forums on methods and solutions to automate software testing. This year AST 2022 is the 3rd edition of a conference that was formerly organized as workshops since 2006. The conference promotes high quality research contributions on methods for software test automation, and original case studies reporting practices in this field. We invite contributions that focus on: i) lessons learned about experiments of automatic testing in practice; ii) experiences of the adoption of testing tools, methods and techniques; iii) best practices to follow in testing and their measurable consequences; and iv) theoretical approaches that are applicable to the industry in the context of AST.

The AST 2022 conference theme is “Software Quality and Trustworthy AI”. Among the others, an aim of this edition is to promote discussions on the mutual influences (both methodological and technological) between SQA and approaches that take advantage of recent improvements in the field of AI. Being Trustworthy also means at least: robustness, safety, explicability, accountability, reproducibility, privacy, legal and equitable; these are some of the said aspects covered by the theme.

Topics of Interest

Submissions on the AST 2022 theme are especially encouraged, but papers on other topics relevant to the automation of software test are also welcome.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• Test automation of large, complex system
• Metrics for testing - test efficiency, test coverage
• Tools for model-based V&V
• Test-driven development
• Standardization of test tools
• Test coverage metrics and criteria
• Product line testing
• Formal methods and theories for testing and test automation
• Test case generation based on formal and semi-formal models
• Testing with software usage models
• Testing of reactive and object-oriented systems
• Software simulation by models, forecasts of behavior and properties
• Application of model checking in testing
• Tools for security specification, models, protocols, testing and evaluation
• Theoretical foundations of test automation
• Models as test oracles; test validation with models
• Testing anomaly detectors
• Testing cyber physical systems
• Automated usability and user experience testing
• Automated Software Testing fo AI applications
• AI for Automated Software Testing

We are interested in the following aspects related to AST:

1. Problem identification. Analysis and specification of requirements for AST, and elicitation of problems that hamper wider adoption of AST
2. Methodology. Novel methods and approaches for AST in the context of up-to-date software development methodologies
3. Technology. Automation of various test techniques and methods for test-related activities, as well as for testing various types of software
4. Tools and Environments. Issues and solutions in the development, operation, maintenance and evolution of tools and environments for AST, and their integration with other types of tools and runtime support platforms
5. Empirical studies, Experience reports, and Industrial Contributions. Real experiences in using automated testing techniques, methods and tools in industry
6. Visions of the future. Foresight and thought-provoking ideas for AST that can inspire new powerful research trends.

Three types of submissions are invited:

• Regular Papers (up to 10 pages plus 2 additional pages of references)
  • Research Paper
  • Industrial Case Study
• Short Papers (up to 4 pages plus 1 additional page of references)
  • Research Paper
  • Industrial Case Study
  • Doctoral Student Research
• Industrial Abstracts (up to 2 pages for all materials)

Regular papers include both Research papers that present research in the area of software test automation, and Industrial Case Studies that report on practical applications of test automation.

Regular papers must not exceed 10 pages (including the main text, appendices, figures, tables) plus 2 additional pages of references.

Short papers also include both Research papers and Industrial Case Studies.

Short papers must not exceed 4 pages plus 1 additional page of references.

As short papers, doctoral students working on software testing are encouraged to submit their work. AST will have an independent session to bring doctoral students working on software testing, with experts assigned to each paper together, to discuss their research in a constructive and international atmosphere, and to prepare for the defense exam. The first author in a submission must be the doctoral student and the second author the advisor. Authors of selected submissions will be invited to make a brief presentation followed by a constructive discussion in a session dedicated to doctoral students.

Industrial abstract talks are specifically conceived to promote industrial participation: We require the first author of such papers to come from industry. Authors of accepted papers get invited to give a talk with the same time length and within the same sessions as regular papers. Industrial abstracts must not exceed 2 pages for all materials.

The submission website is:

• https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ast2022

All submissions must adhere to the following requirements:

• The page limit is strict (10 pages plus 2 additional pages of references for full papers; 4 pages plus 1 additional page of references for short papers; 2 pages for all materials in case of industrial abstracts). It will not be possible to purchase additional pages at any point in the process (including after acceptance).
• Submissions must strictly conform to the ACM formatting instructions. All submissions must be in PDF. Note for Latex users: use \documentclass[sigconf]{acmart} to format your manuscript in 2 columns.
• Submissions must be unpublished original work and should not be under review or submitted elsewhere while being under consideration. AST 2022 will follow the single-blind review process. In addition, by submitting to AST, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. The authors also acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM and the authorship policy of the IEEE.

The accepted regular and short papers, case studies, and industrial abstracts will be published in the ICSE 2022 Co-located Event Proceedings and included in the IEEE and ACM Digital Libraries. Authors of accepted papers are required to register and present their accepted paper at the conference in order for the paper to be included in the proceedings and the Digital Libraries.

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM or IEEE Digital Libraries.

This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2022. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

• 2021 - Virtual (originally in Madrid, Spain)
• 2020 - Seoul - South Korea
• 2019 - Montreal - Canada
• 2018 - Gothenburg - Sweden
• 2017 - Buenos Aires - Argentina
• 2016 - Austin - Texas
• 2015 - Firenze - Italy
• 2014 - Hyderabad - India
• 2013 - San Jose California - USA
• 2012 - Zurich - Switzerland
• 2011 - Waikiki - Hawaii
• 2010 - Cape Town - South Africa
• 2009 - Vancouver - Canada
• 2008 - Leipzig - Germany
• 2007 - Minneapolis - USA
• 2006 - Shanghai - China