Modern software systems rely heavily on Web APIs, yet creating meaningful and executable test scripts remains a largely manual, time-consuming, and error-prone task. In this paper, we present APITestGenie, a novel tool that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and prompt engineering to automatically generate API integration tests directly from business requirements and OpenAPI specifications. We evaluated APITestGenie on 10 real-world APIs, including 8 APIs comprising circa 1,000 live endpoints from an industrial partner in the automotive domain. The tool was able to generate syntactically and semantically valid test scripts for 89% of the business requirements under test after at most three attempts. Notably, some generated tests revealed previously unknown defects in the APIs, including integration issues between endpoints. Statistical analysis identified API complexity and level of detail in business requirements as primary factors influencing success rates, with the level of detail in API documentation also affecting outcomes. Feedback from industry practitioners confirmed strong interest in adoption, substantially reducing the manual effort in writing acceptance tests, and improving the alignment between tests and business requirements.

Large language model (LLM)-powered assistants are increasingly used for generating program code and unit tests, but their application in acceptance testing remains underexplored. To help address this gap, this paper explores the use of LLMs for generating executable acceptance tests for web applications through a two-step process: (i) generating acceptance test scenarios in natural language (in Gherkin) from user stories, and (ii) converting these scenarios into executable test scripts (in Cypress), knowing the HTML code of the pages under test. This two-step approach supports acceptance test-driven development, enhances tester control, and improves test quality. The two steps were implemented in the AutoUAT and Test Flow tools, respectively, powered by GPT-4 Turbo, and integrated into a partner company’s workflow and evaluated on real-world projects. The users found the acceptance test scenarios generated by AutoUAT helpful 95% of the time, even revealing previously overlooked cases. Regarding Test Flow, 92% of the acceptance test cases generated by Test Flow were considered helpful: 60% were usable as generated, 8% required minor fixes, and 24% needed to be regenerated with additional inputs; the remaining 8% were discarded due to major issues. These results suggest that LLMs can, in fact, help improve the acceptance test process, with appropriate tooling and supervision.

Mobile acceptance testing remains a bottleneck in modern software development, particularly for cross-platform mobile development using frameworks like Flutter. While developers increasingly rely on automated testing tools, creating and maintaining acceptance test artifacts still demands significant manual effort. To help tackle this issue, we introduce AToMIC, an automated framework leveraging specialized Large Language Models to generate Gherkin scenarios, Page Objects, and executable UI test scripts directly from requirements (JIRA tickets) and recent code changes. Applied to BMW’s MyBMW app, covering 13 real-world issues in a 170+ screen codebase, AToMIC produced executable test artifacts in under five minutes per feature on standard hardware. The generated artifacts were of high quality: 93.3% of Gherkin scenarios were syntactically correct upon generation, 78.8% of PageObjects ran without manual edits, and 100% of generated UI tests executed successfully. In a survey, all practitioners reported time savings (often a full developer-day per feature) and strong confidence in adopting the approach. These results confirm AToMIC as a scalable, practical solution for streamlining acceptance test creation and maintenance in industrial mobile projects.

As sports analytics evolve to include a broad spectrum of data from diverse sources, the challenge of integrating heterogeneous data becomes pronounced. Current methods struggle with flexibility and rapid adaptation to new data formats, risking data integrity and accuracy. This paper introduces PlayField, a framework designed to robustly handle diverse sports data through adaptable configuration and an automated API. PlayField ensures precise data integration and supports manual interventions for data integrity, making it essential for accurate and comprehensive sports analysis. A case study with ZeroZero demonstrates the framework’s capability to improve data integration efficiency significantly, showcasing its potential for advanced analytics in sports.

One of the most critical ICT application domains is healthcare, where a single failure can lead a patient into a hazardous situation. Due to this, there’s a great necessity to ensure that the developed solutions are safe and secure and perform as expected. Smart-Health-4-All (SH4ALL) is a project aiming at accelerating the research, development, commercialization, and dissemination of trustworthy smart health solutions in Portugal. One of the key components of the project is a web platform that supports the generation of integration and system tests for smart health solutions (comprising medical devices, applications, etc.), following a software product line approach. At the domain engineering level, the platform supports the creation of feature models and related test patterns for families of smart health products. At the product engineering level, the platform supports the instantiation of test patterns and the generation of corresponding test scripts ready for execution on specific products under test. This paper presents the aforementioned test platform and test process, and the discovery of test patterns.

In a growing number of domains, such as IoT for e-health and smart cities, the provisioning of end-to-end services to the users depends on the proper interoperation of multiple systems, forming a new distributed system, often subject to timing constraints. To ensure interoperability and integrity, it is important to conduct integration tests that verify the interactions with the environment and between the system components in key scenarios. To solve the test automation challenges, we propose algorithms for decentralized conformance checking and test input generation, and for checking and enforcing the conditions (local observability and controllability) that allow decentralized test execution. With this, we expect to improve the fault detection and localization capabilities and reduce the communication overhead comparatively to other model-based testing approaches. Our approach will be validated using real case studies from industrial partners.

Industrial cyber-physical systems are becoming increasingly popular and starting to emerge as a response to society's problems using the Internet of Things to create real-time solutions capable of analyzing large amounts of data. In this article, taking advantage of this type of technology, we present a patient prioritization system for hospital emergency services. Our system responds to the problems that occur in hospitals when there is a peak in the number of people using the emergency service, increasing the waiting times. In such a situation, the clinical condition of waiting patients may change after the initial triage, requiring immediate care or at least their re-prioritization. The proposed system consists of a combination of a Smart Priority Recommendation and Patient Control System and an Hospital Emergency Smart Band placed in each patient, allowing to detect changes in the vital signs of waiting patients that may indicate that they need immediate care. This system not only improves the quality of emergency services by ensuring a more efficient prioritization of patients, but in extreme cases can help save human lives.

A dependência da sociedade em sistemas de software cada vez mais complexos torna a tarefa de testar e validar estes sistemas cada vez mais importante e desafiante. Em vários casos, múltiplos sistemas independentes e heterogéneos formam um sistema de sistemas responsável por providenciar serviços aos utilizadores e as ferramentas e técnicas atuais de automação de testes aos mesmos oferecem pouco suporte e apoio para para o desempenho desta tarefa. Este trabalho está inserido num projeto de maior escala que tem como objetivo produzir uma ferramenta de Model-based Testing que automatizará o processo de teste de sistemas distribuídos, a partir de diagramas de sequência UML. Estes diagramas definem graficamente a interação entre os diferentes módulos de um sistema e os seus atores de uma forma sequencial, facilitando a compreensão do funcionamento do sistema e possibilitando a definição de secções críticas dos sistemas distribuídos como situações de concorrência e paralelismo. Esta dissertação pretende desenvolver um dos componentes deste projeto que terá como objetivo a conversão dos diagramas descritivos do sistema em Petri Nets. Petri Nets são um formalismo de modelação que é indicado para descrição de sistemas distribuídos pela sua capacidade de definição de tarefas de comunicação e de sincronização, e pela possibilidade de execução usando ferramentas como CPN Tools. O objetivo será a definição de regras de tradução Model-to-Model que permitirão a conversão de modelos, de modo a possibilitar a integração com o sistema desejado, tirando partido de frameworks existentes de transformação de modelos (por exemplo, EMF - Eclipse Modeling Framework). Com isto conseguimos esconder a complexidade da análise do sistema ao utilizador (Software Tester) introduzindo automação, geração e execução de testes a partir dos diagramas de casos de teste, e apresentando os resultados (Erros e Cobertura de Código) visualmente. Este documento está dividido em quatro secções. A primeira secção apresenta o contexto e motivação para a dissertação e define o problema e objetivos. A segunda secção consiste no resumo dos conceitos necessários à compreensão da dissertação, o estado da arte dos estudos neste domínio e análise das ferramentas para implementar a solu�\xA7ão. A terceira secção explica a arquitetura e as escolhas tecnológicas para a solução proposta. Finalmente, a última secção explica as conclusões para este estudo e define o plano para trabalho futuro.

In a growing number of domains, the provisioning of end-to-end services to the users depends on the proper interoperation of multiple systems, forming a new distributed system, often subject to timing constraints. To ensure interoperability and integrity, it is important to conduct integration tests that verify the interactions with the environment and between the system components in key scenarios. To tackle test automation challenges, we propose algorithms for decentralized conformance checking and test input generation, and for checking and enforcing the conditions (local observability and controllability) that allow decentralized test execution.

The provisioning of a growing number of services depends on the proper interoperation of multiple products, forming a new distributed system, often subject to timing requirements.To ensure the interoperability and timely behavior of this new distributed system, it is important to conduct integration tests that verify the interactions with the environment and between the system components.Integration test scenarios for that purpose may be conveniently specified by means of UML sequence diagrams (SDs) enriched with time constraints.The automation of such integration tests requires that test components are also distributed, with a local tester deployed close to each system component, coordinated by a central tester.The distributed observation of execution events, combined with the impossibility to ensure clock synchronization in a distributed system, poses special challenges for checking the conformance of the observed execution traces against the specification, possibly yielding inconclusive verdicts.Hence, in this paper we investigate decision procedures and criteria to check the conformance of observed execution traces against a specification set by a UML SD enriched with time constraints.The procedures and criteria are specified in a formal language that allows executing and validating the specification.Examples are presented to illustrate the approach.

In this document we outline a Ph.D. research plan and a summary of preliminary results on test automation for distributed and heterogeneous systems.

To cope with the needs raised by the demographic changes in our society, several Ambient-Assisted Living (AAL) technologies have emerged in recent years, but those `first offers' are often monolithic, incompatible and thus expensive and potentially not sustainable. The AAL4ALL project aims at improving that situation through the development of an open ecosystem of interoperable products and services for AAL, tied together via an integration infrastructure. To that end, the project encompasses the specification of a set of reference models and requirements for interoperable products and services, against which candidate products and services can be tested and certified, and subsequently integrated as components of the ecosystem. This paper proposes a testing and certification methodology for such an ecosystem.

The standards around hypermedia documents wrap all technologies for Digital Television and Web delivery such as transmission, content, software layer and return channel. This paper focuses in the software layer, also know as middleware. Many standard multimedia languages have a similar syntax and semantics to describe hypermedia documents, such as Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language and Nested Context Model. However, each one of these languages can only be interpreted by its specific middleware. This scenario generates an enormous problem because a hypermedia document model designed for a specific standard can not be widely shared. Consequently, a same hypermedia document must be translated in several other standards to be widely shared, increasing the authoring efforts and waste of time. This paper introduces a model driven approach to support the widely sharing of hypermedia documents.