Call for papers, Flaky Tests and Beyond: Confronting Non-Determinism in Automated Testing

Flaky tests erode trust in test suites, inflate maintenance costs, and are prevalent across languages and domains. This special issue of Automated Software Engineering seeks original research papers addressing the challenges of flaky tests as well as non-determinism in testing more generally. We invite novel contributions that advance the understanding, detection, prevention, and mitigation of these challenges across diverse systems and contexts. Building on the momentum of the ICSE Flaky Tests Workshops (FTW 2024-2025), we particularly encourage submissions extending workshop findings with substantial new contributions. However, all high-quality research is welcome, including new studies, tools, empirical evaluations, and industrial experience reports that address the topics of interest.

Topics of interest:

• Causes of flaky tests.
• Costs and consequences of flaky tests.
• Debugging of flaky tests.
• Detection of flaky tests.
• Flakiness in emerging contexts and specialized systems.
• Mitigation of flaky tests.
• Non-determinism in testing generally.
• Repair of flaky tests.

Deadline

1 December 2025

How to Submit

Opening date for submissions: 1 September 2025

Editors

Owain Parry, University of Sheffield, o.b.parry@sheffield.ac.uk

Wing Lam, George Mason University, winglam@gmu.edu