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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. 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.
As
the theories of software testing become more mature, a deeper
automation of the testing process becomes feasible, especially
exploiting the advances of model-based testing. In model-based
testing, the software under test (SUT) is considered by means of a
model that focuses on certain aspects, often on the behavior of the
SUT. Models frequently used are finite-state machines and flow graphs.
A
large number of software test tools have been developed in the past a
few years and become available on the market. 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 disciplines 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 and second AST
workshop held at ICSE 2006 and ICSE 2007, which were run very
successfully. They
have attracted many
high quality research papers submitted
to and presented at the last two workshops.
A large number of registered
delegates participated in the workshop with live discussions
throughout the events. The
workshop proceedings were published by ACM Press
and IEEE Computer Society Press in the digital library, respectively. A
journal special issue for selected
best papers in their extended and revised version is now in press
and will be soon published
in the Computer Journal. |
