CALL FOR PAPERS

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Software Test Automation and Practice

Special Track in SEKE 2008

The Twentieth International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE'08)

Hotel Sofitel. San Francisco Bay, USA , July 1– July 3

(URL: http://www.ksi.edu/seke/seke08.html)

1. THEME

Today’s software systems suffer from poor reliability. Many lives and billions of dollars are lost annually due to software errors. According to the report by NIST in 2002, poor software quality costs 60 billion dollars yearly to US economy, and 22 billion dollars can be regained by improving infrastructure for detecting errors using testing closer to the development phase. With the quick increase of software in complexity and scale, test automation is becoming an emerging and effective solution in software quality assurance to meet tight project schedules with quality.

Although many research papers have been published to address software test automation issues and solutions, numerous test automation tools are available for quality assurance engineers; there are still many open issues, obstacles, and challenges in software test automation. One of them is how to transfer and apply the state-of-the-art software test automation solutions and technologies into the engineering practice in the real world.

This special track in SEKE08 is established to provide an effective forum for researchers and industry practitioners to discuss test automation issues, challenges and needs in software projects, and exchange new ideas and solutions as well as practice experience in software test automation.

2. GOALS

The special track on software test automation and practice brings together software test automation researchers and industry practitioners together to exchange innovative ideas, practical solutions, and automation test tools to cope with practical issues and challenges in the real world. This track provides a great platform for both academic researchers and practitioners to discuss the current issues and challenges in automating software test process and quality assurance operations for emerging software technologies in COTS-based systems, SOA-based architectures, web-based and e-commerce applications, and mobile commerce service services.

3. TOPIC OF INTEREST

This special track seeks original research papers and test automation practice reports that present new test automation ideas, methods, and tools to support software test automation in different aspects, such as test generation, test execution, test management, and test coverage analysis. In addition, it also seeks practice reports that present the current issues, challenges, experience and lessons on software test automation projects.

The topics for submissions include but are not limited to the followings:

Issues, challenges, and needs in software test automation and practice
Software test automation tools and solutions for unit testing (black-box and/or white-box)
Automatic techniques and tools for testing software production lines (such as installation testing, and configuration testing)
Automatic software regression test techniques and tools
Model-based software test automation, including models, tools, and techniques
User-oriented software test automation methods, tools, and experience
Requirement specification based software test automation techniques, solutions, and experience
Program-based software test automation methods, tools, and experience
Language-based software test automation techniques and tools
Test-Driven-Development techniques and project experience
Automatic validation techniques and technology for emerging software technologies. (such as SOA-based software, component-based software, web-based software, and mobile-based software applications, and secured application systems)
Software test automation cost analysis and complex measurement
Innovative software test languages, scripting techniques, and tools
Automatic software performance evaluation and reliability measurement
Automatic software test coverage analysis and monitoring
Code coverage analysis and success metrics & measurement for software test automation
System load testing tools and performance evaluation techniques
Software simulation and tools for software auto-testing
Software test automation case studies and empirical studies
Software test automation project experience and lessons learned

3. IMPORTANT DATES

· Paper submission due: March 16, 2008 (FIRM)

· Notification of acceptance: TBA

· Camera-ready copy: May 7, 2008

· Conference: July 1 – 3, 2008

4. SUBMISSION

Papers must be written in English. An electronic version (Postscript, PDF, or MS Word format) of the full paper should be submitted using the following URL: http://conf.ksi.edu/seke08/submit/SubmitPaper.php. Please use Internet Explorer as the browser, and select the paper type “Software Test Automation and Practice”. Manuscript must include a 200-word abstract and no more than 6 pages of IEEE double column text (include figures and references).

TRACK ORGANIZERS

Emese Bari (ebari@ebay.com) , eBay, USA

Jerry Gao (jerrygao@email.sjsu.edu), San Jose State University, USA

Program Committee Members/Reviewers:

Mikhail Auguston (maugusto@nps.edu), Naval Postgraduate School, USA

Xiaoying Bai (baixy@tsinghua.edu.cn), Tsinghua University, China

Kuang-Nan Chang (kuangnan.chang@eku.edu), Eastern Kentucky University, USA

I-Chin Chen (ichen@ebay.com), eBay, USA

Todd Fitch (Todd_Fitch@intuit.com), Intuit Corp, USA

Joontae Park (jopark@ebay.com), eBay, USA

Jennifer Liang (jliang@ebay.com), eBay, USA

Rajesh Subramanyan (rajesh.subramanyan@siemens.com), Siemens Corporate Research, Inc. USA

Ahmed Salem(salema@gaia.ecs.csus.edu), California State University at Sacramento State, USA

Marlon Vieira (marlon.vieira@siemens.com), Siemens Corporate Research, Inc. USA

Ye Wu (wuye@mail.nih.gov), Advanced Information Technology Center, SAIC, USA