Guest editors’ introduction to the special section on exploring the boundaries of software test automation

This special section includes five papers that are substantially extended and revised versions of the best papers presented at AST 2010. Since the first AST workshop held at ICSE 2006 in Shanghai, China, the research on the automation of software testing has developed significantly. The papers in this special section cover a wide range of topics related to software testing. They clearly reflect this trend of diversity in research on software test automation. Test case generation is still one of the most active research topics in the research on software test automation. Two papers in this special section are devoted to test case generation. The paper by Mike Papadakis and Nicos Malevris entitled Automatically Performing Weak Mutation with the Aid of Symbolic Execution, Concolic and Search Based Testing combines symbolic execution, concolic testing and mutation testing techniques from a search-based approach to test case generation. In the paper entitled Enhancing Structural Software Coverage by Incrementally Computing Branch Executability, Mauro Baluda, Pietro Braione, Giovanni Denaro and Mauro Pezze propose a technique that not only generates test cases that execute uncovered branches, but also identifies infeasible branches so that they can be excluded from the calculation of the branch coverage.