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.

Accepted 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: 12 January 2025 (UPDATED)

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.

Keynote: Andreas Zeller

Title: Personalized Fuzzing

When: Mon 28 Apr 2025 09:00 - 10:30

Abstract Random test input generators (fuzzers) have become the prime detectors of vulnerabilities in software. While generic fuzzers easily adapt to arbitrary programs under test, they offer very little possibilities to control or shape the generated inputs. In this talk, I present FANDANGO, a novel language-based fuzzer that combines grammars with predicates over input elements to produce inputs that satisfy all the given predicates. Examples of what such predicates can express include

• input format constraints (“The field should be equal to the length of the payload”)
• checksums (“The field should be a SHA-512 hash of the ”)
• statistical distributions (“Across all inputs, the field must follow a Gaussian distribution, but never exceed 20 mV”)
• data collections (“The field should come from the Python faker library”)

and more – actually, any property that can be expressed in a Python expression.

In our experiments, FANDANGO efficiently solved complex file formats and satisfied demanding predicates. This opens the door towards personalized fuzzing, where testers can make use of their knowledge to very effectively fuzz systems. Includes live demos!

Bio: Andreas Zeller is faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, and professor for Software Engineering at Saarland University. His research on automated debugging, mining software archives, specification mining, and security testing has been highly influential. Andreas is one of the few researchers to have received two ERC Advanced Grants, most recently for his S3 project. He is an ACM Fellow and holds an ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award.

You can find Andreas

• on Bluesky as @andreaszeller.bsky.social,
• on Mastodon as @AndreasZeller@mastodon.social, and
• on LinkedIn as andreaszeller.

Keynote: Tiziana Margaria

Title: Learning-Based Testing: The Ease, the Impact, the Future

When Tue 29 Apr 2025 09:00 - 10:30

Abstract: Modern software systems, in particular when successful, undergo continuous change and therefore require a continuous accompanying quality control at the system level. Today’s testing technology does not sufficiently address this problem as it requires substantial ongoing manual effort. Learning-based testing promises a practical way out. Key to this approach is the combination of the common practice of a periodic system test, monitoring, and model-based text generation, steered and controlled by automatically inferred system models. The talk will consider the history and the state of the art, impact, and perspective of the underlying active automata learning technology, tools and platforms. In particular, it will present promising applications scenarios, ranging from mere specification mining over validation of platform-independence of applications to monitoring-controlled system evolution. Learning-based testing, by its nature, cannot guarantee the correctness of a system, as the inferred models steering the testing process are just concise aggregations of the test history. Its high degree of automation, on the other hand, supports a life-long learning approach that serves for steadily increasing confidence. Fielded applications range from digital twins extraction to neurosymbolic ML.

Bio: Prof. Tiziana Margaria is Chair of Software Systems at the University of Limerick. She leads the digital manufacturing Platform within the Research Ireland funded I-Form Centre for advanced manufacturing and she is a co-director of the National Centre of Research Training in AI. She works on neurosymbolic approaches to create connected digital IT spaces (data, processes, machines, and their interoperability) and on explainable AI for case-by-case auditable high assurance systems. This combines various kinds of formal methods and deterministic reasoning with suitable AI and ML technologies. Her current Research Ireland project on Low-code-No-code platform development devotes over 5 Mio Euro to a formal methods-embedded platform that makes high assurance software application development sustainable and accessible to non-programmers. Tiziana is currently President of the Irish Computing Society (ICS), Vice President of the European Association of Software Science and Technology (EASST); steering committee member of ETAPS. She is past President of FMICS (the ERCIM Working Group on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems) and current Chair of the IFIP WG 1.9/2.15 on Verified Software.

Contact her at tiziana.margaria@ul.ie

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

• 2024 - Lisbon, Portugal
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