Software-supported environments can be critical, pervasive, persistent, mobile, distributed, real-time, embedded, and adaptive. Society and industry are increasingly dependent on software. Thus, a growing need has emerged for providing fast and accurate approaches to develop and evolve these systems. This need drives the development of new techniques, criteria and supporting tools for software testing within these new paradigms.
Systematic and automated approaches have shown to be capable of reducing the overwhelming cost of engineering such systems. Industrial success cases have been reported, and academic interest continues to grow as observed by the increasing number of researchers in the field. While various trends exist on evolving the automation in software testing, sound empirical evidence is still needed in these areas.
This special issue provides a mean for researchers and practitioners to publish recent advances in automated software testing. Specifically, it publishes papers with solid results and a strong contribution to research trends on automated testing, as well as empirical evidence on such approaches.
Edited by: Andre Takeshi Endo, Antonia Bertolino, José Carlos Maldonado and Márcio Eduardo Delamaro