AST 2023 - Call for Papers

4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automation of Software Test (AST) 2023
Co-located with the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2023

Venue: Melbourne, Australia
Website: https://conf.researchr.org/home/ast-2023

SCOPE
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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 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 2023 is the 4th 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:

1. lessons learned about experiments of automatic testing in practice;
2. experiences of the adoption of testing tools, methods and techniques;
3. best practices to follow in testing and their measurable consequences; and
4. theoretical approaches that are applicable to the industry in the context of AST.

TOPICS
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Submissions on the AST 2023 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:

- Test automation of large complex system
- Test Automation in Software Process and Evolution, DevOps, Agile, CI/CD flows
- 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

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
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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)

Submissions must be in IEEE double column format. Accepted papers will be published in IEEE Digital Library.
Submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ast2023

IMPORTANT DATES
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All the following dates are in Melbourne local time (GMT+10).

Submission deadline: Mon 16 Jan 2023
Notification: Mon 20 Feb 2023
Camera ready deadline: Mon 13 Mar 2023
Conference: Mon 15 - Tue 16 May 2023

ORGANIZERS
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General Chair:
- Mehrdad Saadatmand, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Västerås, Sweden
Program Co-Chairs:
- Chunrong Fang, Nanjing University, China
- Sigrid Eldh, Ericsson, Sweden
- Li Li, Monash University, Australia
Proceedings Chair:
- Alejandra Garrido, LIFIA, University of La Plata & CONICET, Argentina
Web and Publicity chair:
- Muhammad Abbas, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Västerås, Sweden



Contact: ast2023@easychair.org