Editorial for the special issue of STVR on the 5th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation (ICST 2012)
Antonia Bertolino, Yvan Labiche · Software Testing Verification and Reliability · 2014
The 5th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation (ICST 2012) was held on 17–21 April 2012, in Montreal, Québec, Canada. ICST has established itself as the premier forum for presentation of leading edge results on outstanding topics in all areas related to software quality. The conference brings together researchers and practitioners who study the theory, techniques, technologies, and applications of software testing, verification, and validation. ICST 2012 originally attracted 177 submissions, among which 41 research papers and seven industry papers were selected for inclusion in the proceedings. All papers were refereed by at least three members of the ICST 2012 Program Committee. Of the 48 papers accepted, five papers were selected by the Program Co-Chairs, Antonia Bertolino and Yvan Labiche, for consideration for this special issue of STVR. These papers were extended from their conference version by the authors and subjected to the rigorous STVR reviewing process, thus undergoing additional rounds of reviews and revisions. Three papers successfully completed the review process and are contained in this special issue. The first paper, “Automatic Testing of GUI-Based Applications” by Leonardo Mariani, Mauro Pezzè, Oliviero Riganelli, and Mauro Santoro, describes a technique to automatically create a test suite, or augment an existing one, to exercise a GUI-based application with black box, system level test cases. The test cases are synthesized incrementally by employing reinforcement learning. Results indicate improvements over other state of the art techniques in terms of amount of behaviour being exercised by the augmented test suite, and therefore in potential of fault detection. The second paper, “Automatic Test Case Evolution” by Mehdi Mirzaaghaei, Fabrizio Pastore, and Mauro Pezzè, presents a framework to repair test cases that have become obsolete due to evolution and also use information in an existing test suite to generate new test cases. The authors refer to this process as the evolution of a test suite. Experimental evaluation on five different case study systems provides very encouraging results, with a high effectiveness at repairing broken test cases. The third paper, “An Efficient Regression Testing Approach for PHP Web Applications: A Controlled Experiment” by Hyunsook Do and Md. Hossain, introduces a regression testing technique for PHP web applications based on impact analysis and program slicing. A controlled experiment on five non-trivial web applications taken from SourceForge shows a promising reduction of regression testing costs. The special issue editors would like to express their gratitude to the many people who contributed to the successful organization of ICST 2012. Although it is not possible to list them all, a mention goes to the General Chair, Giulio Antoniol, the Industrial Track Chairs, Thomas Ostrand, Saurabh Sinha, and Peter Zimmerer, and the ICST Steering Committee members. The high quality of the papers in this special issue is certainly due to all ICST authors, who dedicated effort and energy in sharing their results with the community, and made up a great pool from which invitations to submit to the journal could be issued; it is due as well to the ICST 2012 Program Committee and the STVR additional reviewers, who provided extensive competent feedback. Last but not least, the STVR chief editors, Robert Hierons and Jeff Offutt, provided expert guidance and important advice throughout the process. Enjoy!