Scope

Software pervasiveness in both industry and digital society, as well as the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are continuously leading to emerging needs from both software producers and consumers. Infrastructures, software components, and applications aim to hide their increasing complexity in order to appear more human-centric. However, the potential risk from design errors, poor integrations, and time-consuming engineering phases can result in unreliable solutions that can barely meet their intended objectives. In this context, Software Engineering processes and methods keep demanding for the investigation of novel and further refined approaches to Software Quality Assurance (SQA).

Software testing automation is a discipline that has produced noteworthy research in the last decades. The search for solutions to automatically test any concept of software is critical, and it encompasses several areas: from the generation of the test cases, test oracles, test stubs/mocks; through the definition of selection and prioritization criteria; up to the engineering of infrastructures governing the execution of testing sessions locally or remotely in the cloud.

The Automation of Software Test (AST) conference continues with a long record of international scientific forums on methods and solutions to automate software testing. In 2026, AST is in its 7th edition of a conference that was formerly organized as workshops since 2006. The conference promotes high-quality research contributions on methods for software test automation, and original case studies reporting practices in this field. We invite contributions that focus on: i) lessons learned about experiments of automatic testing in practice; ii) experiences of the adoption of testing tools, methods and techniques; iii) best practices to follow in testing and their measurable consequences; and iv) theoretical approaches that are applicable to the industry in the context of AST.

Our theme for this year is “Adapting test automation to the AI era including sustainability and emerging challenges” with special sessions on test automation for AI, sustainability, and AI testing education and training.

Topics of Interest

Submissions on the AST 2026 theme are especially encouraged, but papers on other topics relevant to the automation of software tests are also welcome. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

    AI for Automated Software Testing
    Testing of AI-based systems
    Effective testing through explainable AI
    Education to software testing with the advent of AI-based technology
    Automated software testing for sustainability, resource efficiency, energy consumption
    Codeless and low code test automation
    Test Automation in Software Process and Evolution, DevOps, Agile, CI/CD flows
    Test-driven development
    Model-based testing
    Formal methods, model checking and theories for testing and test automation
    Test case generation based on formal, semi-formal and AI models
    Theoretical foundations and methods for test automation
    Standardization of test languages, processes and tools
    Security, performance, and robustness testing
    Functional, interoperability, and conformance testing
    Usability and user experience testing
    Software simulation and automated software testing
    Testing of embedded, reactive and object-oriented systems
    Test automation of large complex systems
    Testing cyber physical systems
    Testing cloud and web systems and services
    Product line testing
    Testing anomaly detectors
    Metrics for testing - test effectiveness, efficiency, test coverage
    Testing tools
    Testing in different industry domains including healthcare, energy, finance, etc.