Software testing is indispensable for all software
development. As all mature engineering disciplines need to have
systematic testing methodologies, software testing is a very important
subject of software engineering. In software development practice,
testing accounts for as much as 50% of total development efforts. It is
imperative to reduce the cost and improve the effectiveness of software
testing by automating the testing process, which contains many testing
related activities using various techniques and methods.
Automation is the future trend of software testing in
order to reduce its cost. In the past decades, a great amount of
research effort has been spent on automatic test case generation,
automatic test oracles, etc. However, the current practice of software
test automation is mostly based on recording manual testing activities
and replaying recorded test scripts for regression testing. Bridging the
gap between theory and practice will not only significantly improve the
current-state of software production, but also foster innovative
research in the area. As the theories of software testing become more
mature, a deeper automation of the testing process becomes feasible.
Indeed, a large number of software test tools have been developed in the
past a few years and become available on the market. However, few of
them have taken inter-operability into serious consideration. Software
systems have become more and more complicated with components developed
by different vendors and using different techniques in different
programming languages and even run on different platforms. Few software
testing tools can support all testing tasks within one tool. Therefore,
it is timely and important for the development of software testing
methodologies and scientific discipline as a part of software
engineering. The workshop will provide researchers and practitioners a
forum for exchanging ideas, experiences, understanding of the problems,
visions for the future, and promising solutions to the problems. The
workshop will also provide a platform for researchers and developers of
testing tools to work together to identify the problems in the theory
and practice of software test automation and to set an agenda and lay
the foundation for future development.
The workshop is the successor of the first AST
workshop held at ICSE 2006, which was run very successful. Eighteen high
quality research papers were presented at the workshop and published in
the workshop proceedings by ACM Press. Sixty five registered delegates
participated in the workshop with live discussions throughout the event.
A journal special issue for the publication of best papers in their
extended and revised version is now in the process of editing and will
be published in the Computer Journal early next year.
