Message from the A-MOST 2017 Chairs: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW)

Welcome to the 13th edition of the Advances in Model-based testing (A-MOST 2017) held on March 17th, 2017 in beautiful Tokyo, Japan. Context of A-MOST: The complexity of software systems is increasing rapidly and thus warrants the development of novel automated testing techniques that can manage the increased complexity of software. Model-Based Testing (MBT) is one such approach towards automated testing that allows managing the complexity of the Software under Test with the use of models. A recent survey shows that MBT has been increasing, being used both in academic and in industrial settings and thus still remains an interesting area of research. In the past 12 years, A-MOST has served as a good venue for interaction among model-based testing researchers from both academia and industry. In 2017, A-MOST received in total eight submissions, and six of them were accepted after a thorough review and discussion process. Each submission was reviewed by three members of the program committee. The topics of accepted papers cover security testing, test case generation, conformance checking, software product line testing and usability testing. The accepted papers are divided into two main sections, i.e., functional MBT and non-functional MBT that will be presented during the workshop. Moreover, we are also delighted to have two well-renowned MBT researchers as keynote speakers. The first keynote speaker is Ina Schieferdecker who is the director of Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany. The topic of her keynote speech is "The New Version of the UML Testing Profile". The second keynote speaker is Shaukat Ali who is currently a senior research scientist from Simula Research Laboratory, Norway. His theme of the keynote speech is "Uncertainty-Wise Testing". We thank them very much for accepting our invitations for their inspiring keynote speeches. We also appreciate the effort made by our program committee members- for providing their timely reviews with high quality. Last but not least, we would like to thank the A-MOST steering committee for their support and advice. Last, we thank all the authors who submitted their high quality work to A-MOST 2017.