The 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automation of Software Test (AST 2025)

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 is the 6th 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.

Authors of the best papers presented at AST 2025 will be invited to submit an extension of their work for possible inclusion in a special issue in Software Testing, Verification, and Reliability (STVR) journal

Call for papers.

Call for Papers

Scope

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 and methods 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 decades. 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.

The Automation of Software Test (AST) conference continues with a long record of international scientific forums on methods and solutions to automate software testing. In 2025, AST is in its 6th 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.

Our theme for this year is “Adapting test automation to the AI era including sustainability and emerging challenges” with special sessions on test automation for AI, sustainability, and AI testing education and training.

Topics of Interest

Submissions on the AST 2025 theme are especially encouraged, but papers on other topics relevant to the automation of software tests are also welcome. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• AI for Automated Software Testing
• Testing of AI-based systems
• Effective testing through explainable AI
• Education to software testing with the advent of AI-based technology
• Automated software testing for sustainability, resource efficiency, energy consumption
• Codeless and low code test automation
• Test Automation in Software Process and Evolution, DevOps, Agile, CI/CD flows
• Test-driven development
• Model-based testing
• Formal methods, model checking and theories for testing and test automation
• Test case generation based on formal, semi-formal and AI models
• Theoretical foundations and methods for test automation
• Standardization of test languages, processes and tools
• Security, performance, and robustness testing
• Functional, interoperability, and conformance testing
• Usability and user experience testing
• Software simulation and automated software testing
• Testing of embedded, reactive and object-oriented systems
• Test automation of large complex systems
• Testing cyber physical systems
• Testing cloud and web systems and services
• Product line testing
• Testing anomaly detectors
• Metrics for testing - test effectiveness, efficiency, test coverage
• Testing tools
• Testing in different industry domains including healthcare, energy, finance, etc.

Important Dates

Submission: 9 November 2024

Notification: 10 January 2025

Final version: 31 January 2025

Conference: 28-29 April 2025

Organizers

Andy Zaidman, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands (General Chair)

Francesca Lonetti, ISTI-CNR, Italy (Program Co-Chair)

Ina Schieferdecker, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany (Program Co-Chair)

Rajesh Subramanyan, Stealth Startup & University of Washington, USA (Program Co-Chair)

Submission Details

Three types of submissions are invited for both research and industry:

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

The submission website is: https://ast2025.hotcrp.com/

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 IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options).

IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines: https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html

Submissions must be unpublished original work and should not be under review or submitted elsewhere while being under consideration. AST 2025 will follow the double-blind review process. The accepted regular and short papers, case studies, and industrial abstracts will be published in the ICSE 2025 Co-located Event Proceedings and included in the IEEE and ACM 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 2025. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. Purchases of additional pages in the proceedings are not allowed.

Special Issue

Authors of the best papers presented at AST 2025 will be invited to submit an extension of their work for possible inclusion in a special issue.

https://conf.researchr.org/attending/icse-2025/registration

• 2024 - Lisbon, Portugal
• 2023 - Melbourne, Australia
• 2022 - Pittsburgh, USA
• 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