Call for Papers: AST 2026

The 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automation of Software Test (AST 2026) will be held from April 13-14, 2026, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, co-located with ICSE 2026 at the Windsor Convention Center and Hotels.

Scope

Software pervasiveness and the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies highlight the continuous need for advanced approaches to Software Quality Assurance (SQA). Software testing automation is a critical discipline encompassing test case generation, test oracles, selection criteria, and execution infrastructure engineering.

AST promotes high-quality research contributions on methods for software test automation and original case studies. We invite contributions focusing on:

• Lessons learned from automatic testing experiments.
• Experiences with the adoption of testing tools, methods, and techniques.
• Best practices in testing and their measurable consequences.
• Theoretical approaches applicable to industry.

Theme: "Adapting test automation to the AI era including sustainability and emerging challenges"

Special sessions will focus on test automation for AI, sustainability, and AI testing education and training.

Topics of Interest

Submissions on the AST 2026 theme are especially encouraged. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• AI for Automated Software Testing
• Testing of AI-based systems
• Effective testing through explainable AI
• Education for software testing with AI
• Automated software testing for sustainability
• Codeless and low-code test automation
• Test Automation in DevOps, Agile, CI/CD flows
• Test-driven development
• Model-based testing
• Formal methods and model checking for testing
• Test case generation
• Theoretical foundations 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
• 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 (effectiveness, efficiency, coverage)
• Testing tools
• Testing in various industry domains (healthcare, energy, finance, etc.)

Submission Details

Three types of submissions are invited for both research and industry:

• Regular Papers: (up to 10 pages + 2 pages for references) Research Paper or Industrial Case Study.
• Short Papers: (up to 4 pages + 1 page for references) Research Paper, Industrial Case Study, or Doctoral Student Research.
• Industrial Abstracts: (up to 2 pages for all materials).

The submission website is https://conf.researchr.org/signin/ast-2026/https%3A%5Es%5Esconf.researchr.org%5Eshome%5Esast-2026.

Requirements:

• Page limits are strict; no additional pages can be purchased.
• Submissions must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template. For guidelines, visit: https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html
• Submissions must be original, unpublished work, and not under review elsewhere.
• AST 2026 follows a double-blind review process.
• Accepted papers will be published in the ICSE 2026 Co-located Event Proceedings and included in the IEEE and ACM Digital Libraries.

Important Dates (AoE - UTC-12h)

• Submission Deadline: 26 October 2025
• Notification of Acceptance: 05 January 2026
• Camera-Ready Deadline: 26 January 2026
• Conference Dates: 13-14 April 2026

Registration

Registration details can be found at: https://conf.researchr.org/attending/icse-2026/registration

Special Issue

Authors of the best papers will be invited to submit an extended version for a special issue.