How the Experience of Development Teams Relates to Assertion Density of Test Classes

The impact of developers' experience on several development practices has been widely investigated in the past. One of the most promising research fields is software testing, as many researchers found significant correlations between developers' experience and testing effectiveness. In this paper, we aim at further studying this relation, by...

The scent of a smell: an extensive comparison between textual and structural smells

How Do Community Smells Influence Code Smells?

Automatic Test Smell Detection using Information Retrieval Techniques

Software testing is a key activity to control the reliability of production code. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of test cases can be threatened by the presence of faults. Recent work showed that static indicators can be exploited to identify testrelated issues. In particular test smells, i.e., sub-optimal design choices applied by developers...

On The Relation of Test Smells to Software Code Quality

Test smells are sub-optimal design choices in the implementation of test code. As reported by recent studies, their presence might not only negatively affect the comprehension of test suites but can also lead to test cases being less effective in finding bugs in production code. Although significant steps toward understanding test smells, there...

Context Is King: The Developer Perspective on the Usage of Static Analysis Tools

An Exploratory Study on the Relationship between Changes and Refactoring

Refactoring aims at improving the internal structure of a software system without changing its external behavior. Previous studies empirically assessed, on the one hand, the benefits of refactoring in terms of code quality and developers’<br/>productivity, and on the other hand, the underlying reasons that push programmers to apply refactoring....

PETrA: A Software-Based Tool for Estimating the Energy Profile of Android Applications

Energy efficiency is a vital characteristic of any mobile application, and indeed is becoming an important factor for user satisfaction. For this reason, in recent years several approaches and tools for measuring the energy consumption of mobile devices have been proposed. Hardware-based solutions are highly precise, but at the same time they...

Developer-Related Factors in Change Prediction: An Empirical Assessment

Predicting the areas of the source code having a higher likelihood to change in the future is a crucial activity to allow developers to plan preventive maintenance operations such as refactoring or peer-code reviews. In the past the research community was active in devising change prediction models based on structural metrics extracted from the...

Software-Based Energy Profiling of Android Apps: Simple, Efficient and Reliable?

Modeling the power profile of mobile applications is a crucial activity to identify the causes behind energy leaks. To this aim, researchers have proposed hardware-based tools as well as model-based and software-based techniques to approximate the actual energy profile. However, all these solutions present their own advantages and disadvantages....

Lightweight Detection of Android-specific Code Smells: The aDoctor Project

Code smells are symptoms of poor design solutions applied by programmers during the development of software systems. While the research community devoted a lot of effort to studying and devising approaches for detecting the traditional code smells defined by Fowler, little knowledge and support isavailable for an emerging category of Mobile app...

Automatic Test Case Generation: What If Test Code Quality Matters?

Test case generation tools that optimize code coverage have been extensively investigated. Recently, researchers have suggested to add other non-coverage criteria, such as mem- ory consumption or readability, to increase the practical use- fulness of generated tests. In this paper, we observe that test code quality metrics, and test cohesion and...