http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/bin/view/ATSE2009

Context

Trends such as globalisation, standardisation and shorter lifecycles place great demands on the flexibility of the software industry. In order to compete
and cooperate on an international scale, a constantly decreasing time to market and an increasing level of quality are essential. Software and systems testing is at the moment the most important and mostly used quality assurance technique applied in industry. However, the complexity of software systems and hence of their development is increasing. Systems get bigger, connect large amounts of components that interact in many different ways, and have constantly changing and different types of requirements (functionality, dependability, real-time, etc.). Consequently, the development of cost-effective and high-quality systems opens new challenges that cannot be faced only with traditional testing approaches.

New techniques for systematization and automation of testing are required. Even though many test automation tools are currently available to aid test
planning and control as well as test case execution and monitoring, all these tools share a similar passive philosophy towards test case design, selection
of test data and test evaluation. They leave these crucial, time-consuming and demanding activities to the human tester. This is not without reason; test case design and test evaluation are difficult to automate with the techniques available in current industrial practice. The domain of possible inputs (potential test cases), even for a trivial program, is typically too large to be exhaustively explored.

Consequently, one of the major challenges associated with test case design is the selection of test cases that are effective at finding flaws without requiring an excessive number of tests to be carried out. This is the problem which this workshop wants to attack.

This 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 in automated test case generation, selection and evaluation. 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.

Important Dates
Submission deadline:         15th of March, 2009
Notification of acceptance:  10th of April, 2009

Topics (non-exclusive)
- Search Based and Evolutionary Software Testing
- Automated Generation of Test Cases
- Automated Generation of Test Scripts
- Automated Blackbox testing
- Automated Whitebox testing
- Trace-based testing
- Presentation of tools for automated testing
- Empirical studies comparing different automated software testing tools

Submissions
We expect the following types of submissions:
- Research in progress, including research results at a premature stage.
- Experience reports. Positive experiences should present techniques and tools that work and the situations in which they work.
  Negative experiences should be used to highlight new research challenges.
- Surveys, case studies and comparative studies that investigate pros, cons and complementarities of existing tools.
- Vision papers stating where the research in the field should be heading towards.
- Tool demonstrations.
The length of the submitted papers should be between 4 and 6 pages in the format specified at the website and can be either in Spanish or English.
The paper format guidelines can be found at: http://www.aisti.eu/cisti2009/papersformat.pdf
Submit your contribution via EasyChair at the following URL: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=atse2009
There will 2 prizes of 250 EUR for best paper and presentation, sponsored by the company ps_testware (http://www.pstestware.com/).

Publication
Accepted papers will be published in CISTI's conference's main proceedings.

Organising Committee
Tanja Vos
Centre for Software Production - ProS
Universidad Politecnica de Valencia

Program Committee (to be completed)

Enrique Alba (Universidad de Malaga, Spain)

Arthur Baars (Instituto Tecnológico de Informática, Valencia, Spain)

Youssef Hassoun (Kings College Londen, UK)

Bart Knaack (Logica, The Netherlands)

Pieter Koopman (Nijmegen University, The Netherlands)

Kiran Lakhotia (Kings College Londen, UK)

Javier Tuya (Universidad de Oviedo, Spain)

Andreas Windisch (Daimler, Germany)

Felix Lindlar (Daimler, Germany)

Venue

ATSE2009 will take place in Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal and is co-located with the CISTI2009 conference.

Contact

If you have any further requests, please address your e-mails to tvos (at) dsic.upv.es and wishnu (at) cs.uu.nl.