Special Issue: IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Validation & Verification 2018

This special issue contains extended versions of two papers from the 11th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Validation & Verification (ICST 2018). ICST strives to provide an open forum for researchers, scientists, engineers, and practitioners working on software testing to present and discuss the latest research findings, ideas and developments. This was no exception at ICST 2018, where the collocation with the quarterly meeting of Swedish Association of Software Testing (SAST) led to strong industry presence and cross pollination of ideas. Based on the reviews from the program committee members, as well as the discussion with the Editors-in-Chief about their relevance to STVR, we invited authors of three papers to extend their papers and submit to the special section. The submitted manuscript went through a rigorous reviewing process by a panel of experts that included, but was not limited to, the members of the ICST 2018 program committee. During the process, two of the three papers were handled by one of us (Prof. Feldt) due to conflicts of interest. After finalizing the review and revision process two papers were accepted for publication in this special issue. The first paper, “DeMiner: Test Generation for High Test Coverage through Mutant Exploration” by Shin Hong, Yunho Kim, and Moonzoo Kim, introduces a way of using mutation analysis to improve the code coverage achieved by concolic testing. Called “Invasive Software Testing”, the proposed technique exploits additional information about the concrete and dynamic behaviour of the System Under Test, via mutation testing, to set goalposts for improved concolic testing. The second paper, “Effective Repair of Internationalization Presentation Failures in Web Applications Using Style Similarity Clustering and Search-Based Techniques” by Sonal Mahajan, Abdulmajeed Alameer, Phil McMinn, and William Halfond, introduces an automated repair technique for presentation failures in web pages regarding internationalization. The proposed technique, IFix+, can address presentation failures that stem from interactions of multiple style components by clustering DOM elements based on their visual appearances. Subsequently, IFix+ uses a search based approach to find a CSS patch that avoids introduction of any new failures. We express our thanks to everyone who contributed to the success of ICST 2018, as well as to this special section. We are grateful to the authors for extending their paper and submitting their valuable work to STVR. We would also like to express our gratitude to everyone who worked hard to make ICST 2018 the great success it was: in the midst of a global pandemic, the memory of the conference is something we all cherish deeply. In particular, we thank the general chair, Hans Hansson. Finally, we would like to thank both Robert Hierons and Tao Xie, for their support and guidance for this special issue.