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CALL FOR PAPERS

The 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automation of Software Test (AST 2027), https://conf.researchr.org/home/ast-2027

26-27 April, 2027 @ICSE 2027, Dublin, Ireland

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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 2027, AST is in its 8th 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 “Testing in the Age of AI: Governance, Compliance, and Oversight”

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Topics of interest
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Submissions on the AST 2027 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.


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Important Dates
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Submission: 30 October 2026

Notification: 08 January 2027

Final version: 29 January 2027

Conference: 26-27 April 2027


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

- Regular Papers (up to 10 pages plus 2 additional pages of references)
- Short papers in the format of 5-page extended abstracts.
- Industrial extended abstracts (up to 2 pages for all materials)

The submission website is: https://ast2027.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 2027 will follow the double-blind review process. The accepted regular papers, short papers, and industrial abstracts will be published in the ICSE 2027 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 Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2027. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

It is mandatory that at least one author will register and present the paper during the AST conference.



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Organizing Committee
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Beatriz Marín, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain (General Chair)

Jeremy Bradbury, Ontario Tech University, Canada (Program Co-Chair)

Ana Paiva, University of Porto, Portugal (Program Co-Chair)

Abbas Khan, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Sweden (Program Co-Chair)