How Developers Engineer Test Cases: An Observational Study

One of the main challenges that developers face when testing their systems lies in engineering test cases that are good enough to reveal bugs. And while our body of knowledge on software testing and automated test case generation is already quite significant, in practice, developers are still the ones responsible for engineering test cases...

Search-Based Software Re-Modularization: A Case Study at Adyen

Deciding what constitutes a single module, what classes belong to which module or the right set of modules for a specific software system has always been a challenging task. The problem is even harder in large-scale software systems composed of thousands of classes and hundreds of modules. Over the years, researchers have been proposing...

Atoms of Confusion in Java

Although writing code seems trivial at times, problems arise when humans misinterpret what the code actually does. One of the potential causes are "atoms of confusion", the smallest possible patterns of misinterpretable source code. Previous research has investigated the impact of atoms of confusion in C code. Results show that developers make...

OffSide: Learning to Identify Mistakes in Boundary Conditions

Mistakes in boundary conditions are the cause of many bugs in software. These mistakes happen when, e.g., developers make use of '<' or '>' in cases where they should have used '<=' or '>='. Mistakes in boundary conditions are often hard to find and manually detecting them might be very time-consuming for developers. While...

Tracing Back Log Data to its Log Statement: From Research to Practice

Logs are widely used as a source of information to understand the activity of computer systems and to monitor their health and stability. However, most log analysis techniques require the link between the log messages in the raw log file and the log statements in the source code that produce them. Several solutions have been proposed to solve...

Monitoring-aware IDEs

Engineering modern large-scale software requires software developers to not solely focus on writing code, but also to continuously examine monitoring data to reason about the dynamic behavior of their systems. These additional monitoring responsibilities for developers have only emerged recently, in the light of DevOps culture. Interestingly,...