Competition Overview

Self-driving cars (SDCs) are equipped with onboard cameras and various sensors, which have already demonstrated the possibility of autonomous driving in real environments, leading to great interest in various application domains. However, despite the necessity of systematically testing such complex and automated systems to ensure their safe operation in real-world environments, there has been relatively limited investment in this direction so far.

The SDC Testing Competition organized jointly by the International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST) and Search-Based and Fuzz Testing (SBFT) workshop @ ICSE is an initiative designed to inspire and encourage the Software Testing Community to direct their attention toward SDCs as a rapidly emerging and crucial domain. The joint call is meant to help interested authors/participants reduce travel costs by selecting the most convenient and close venue.

The competition focuses on regression testing for test suites executing system tests of SDCs in simulation. Regression testing involves test selection, prioritization, and minimization. For the competition, we focus on the second aspect - the test prioritization, as detailed in the competition platform repository.

Link to the competition platform: https://github.com/christianbirchler-org/sdc-testing-competition/blob/main/competitions/2026.md

Test Prioritization

Test Prioritization is the process of ordering a selection of test cases from the test suite. In the context of simulation-based testing for SDCs with long running test cases, we select test cases fulfilling certain constraints.

Aim

The competition aims to get submissions of novel and cost-effective test prioritizations. After the submission, all tools will be evaluated by the organizers.

Upon acceptance, all participants are asked to submit a short paper about their tool to the organizers of this track. Examples of such tool reports can be found at SBFT 2025 https://sbft25.github.io/papers/)

Tool Submission

You can freely decide on the venue you want to compete in: ICST 2026 or SBFT@ICSE 2026. Participants in each venue will be evaluated and ranked independently.

The submission process is described on the competition platform.

Tool Paper Submission

You will be contacted by the publisher with the instructions for preparing and submitting the camera-ready version of your paper. The given page limits (i.e., 2 pages for tool papers) are strict. The list of authors (names, emails, affiliations, order) and the paper title must not change. If a correction is needed, please email us promptly.

If submitting to ICST 2026, include the following reference:

@inproceedings{ICST-SDC2026,
  author       = {Prakash Aryan and Tommaso Fulcini and Luigi Starace and Christian Birchler and Sebastiano Panichella},
  title        = {{ICST} Tool Competition 2026 – SDC Testing Track},
  booktitle    = {International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)},
  year         = {2026}
}

Competition Platform

All competition guidelines, descriptions, and Q&A are managed on GitHub. The competition platform is publicly available: https://github.com/christianbirchler-org/sdc-testing-competition

Participants are welcome to discuss any issues related to the competition platform directly on GitHub.

Contacts

• Prakash Aryan: prakash.aryan@unibe.ch
• Tommaso Fulcini: tommaso.fulcini@polito.it
• Luigi Starace: luigiliberolucio.starace@unina.it
• Christian Birchler: christian.birchler@unibe.ch
• Sebastiano Panichella: sebastiano.panichella@unibe.ch