Foreword

The workshop is the 8th edition of the successful AST workshops held at ICSE 2006-2012. It provided researchers and practitioners with a forum for exchanging ideas, experiences, understanding of the problems, visions for the future, and promising solutions to the problems. The workshop has also provided a platform for researchers and developers of testing tools to work together to identify the problems in the theory and practice of software test automation and to set an agenda and lay the foundation for future development. In recent years, "Test-as-a-Service" (TaaS) has emerged as an integral part of cloud computing, where testing are automated and delivered in the form of services together with all types of other services at all levels of cloud services, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS). AST 2013 workshop took place in this background with a special focus theme on TaaS. The keynote speeches and Charette discussion sections will all be on this topic. In particular, Professor Jerry Gao will give a keynote on "Testing as a Service on Clouds." We received a total of 38 submissions from 114 authors of 17 countries. Each article was reviewed by at least 3 PC members and evaluated according to the criteria of relevance, originality, soundness, maturity and presentation quality, and online discussions about the reviews takes place in order to resolve conflict opinions after the reviews were completed. Decisions were made based on the review results as well as the outcomes of the online discussions. 18 submissions were accepted as the full papers. An additional 6 submissions were accepted as short papers to encourage authors\´ participation to the event. The articles were grouped into a number of sessions: Session 1 and 2: Testing-as-a-Service (I & II); Session 3: Testing Distributed, Concurrent and Parallel Systems; Session 4: Security Testing; Session 5: Test Case Generation; Session 6: Reuse, Re- actoring and Regression Test, Session 6: Application of Software Testing, Session 7: Testing and Debugging.