American University of Sharjah hosted the 27th International Conference in Testing Software and Systems (ICTSS 2015) today, Monday, November 23, 2015. Organized by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at AUS, the ICTSS conference is one of a series of international conferences that aims to address the conceptual, theoretic and practical problems of testing software systems, including communication protocols, services, distributed platforms, middleware, embedded- and cyber-physical-systems and security infrastructures.

This year, ICTSS has compiled 42 submissions from 22 countries, while 14 papers and 4 short papers have been coauthored from countries that include Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, KSA, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden, The Netherlands, Tunisia, Turkey, UK, and USA.

Keynote speakers of the ICTSS 2015 included professor Gregor V. Bochman, from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa, Canada; and Professor Teruo Higashino, a faculty member from the school of Information Science and Technology at Osaka University, Japan.

Dr. Leland Blank, Dean of the College of Engineering (CEN), welcomed the guests and provided them with a brief background of CEN and its future expansion plans. Other senior university officials including faculty members and students were also present on the occasion.

Topics discussed during the conference included Aspects of Testing: test derivation, test selection, test coverage, test implementation and execution, test result analysis, test oracles, test management, monitoring and runtime verification, test frameworks; Model-based Testing: Formal models and modeling languages such as automata, state machines, process algebra, logics, UML, HOL, test generation from models, model coverage; Combination of Techniques: that demonstrate how to systematically combine testing and formal (model-based) verification and analysis to improve quality and reduce effort; and Quality Aspects: Functional, security, reliability, robustness, etc., to name a few.

ICTSS is the successor of previous (joint) conferences TESTCOM and FATES and aims to be a forum for researchers, developers, testers and users to review, discuss and learn about new approaches, concepts, theories, methodologies, tools and experiences in the field of testing of communicating systems and software.

The ICTSS 2015 was organized by the local organization committee of ICTSS at AUS, Professor Khaled El-Fakeh; Associate Professor of Computer Science, Gerassimos Barlas; Professor of Computer Science, and Abdulrahman Al-Ali; Professor of Computer Science.