Editorial for special issue of STVR on software testing, verification, and validation ‐ volume 1 (extended selected papers from ICST 2011)

The 4th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation (ICST 2011) was held on 21-25 March 2011, in Berlin, Germany. The aim of the ICST conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners who study the theory, techniques, technologies, and applications that concern all aspects of software testing, verification, and validation of software systems. The ICST 2011 program chairs, Mark Harman and Bogdan Korel, selected 35 research papers for inclusion in the proceedings from among 166 submissions. All papers were refereed by at least three program committee members. Of the 35 papers accepted, we selected six papers for consideration for this special issue of STVR. These papers were extended from their conference version by the authors and were reviewed according to the STVR reviewing process. Five papers successfully completed the review process and are contained in this special issue. These papers are spread across two special issues of STVR. This issue includes the first three papers. The rest of this editorial provides a brief overview of these three papers. The first paper, ‘Configuring Effective Navigation Models and Abstract Test Cases for Web Applications by Analyzing User Behavior’ by Sara Sprenkle, Lori Pollock and Lucy Simko, reports on an exploratory study of automatically generated abstract test cases and the underlying usage-based navigation models for Web applications. The results suggest that web testers can easily configure statistical model-based automated test generators to generate tests closely related to user behaviour. The second paper, ‘Testing of Data-Centric and Event-Based Dynamic Service Compositions’ by Waldemar Hummer, Orna Raz, Onn Shehory, Philipp Leitner, and Schahram Dustdar, investigates integration testing of data-centric and event-based dynamic service compositions with an emphasis on data-flow centric coverage goals. The evaluation of the presented approach for different performance characteristics demonstrates the end-to-end practicability of the approach. The third paper, ‘Demand-driven Propagation-based Strategies for Testing Changes’ by Raul Santelices and Mary Jean Harrold, presents a novel, demand-driven approach for performing the propagation-based testing of changes. The experimental study shows that the approach can be practical and can scale to large programs.