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...

The Scent of a Smell: An Extensive Comparison between Textual and Structural Smells

Code smells are symptoms of poor design or implementation choices that have a negative effect on several aspects of software maintenance and evolution, such as program comprehension or change- and fault-proneness. This is why researchers have spent a lot of effort on devising methods that help developers to automatically detect them in source...

Oops, My Tests Broke the Build: An Explorative Analysis of Travis CI with GitHub

AbContinuous Integration (CI) has become a best practice of modern software development. Yet, at present, we have a shortfall of insight into the testing practices that are common in CI-based software development. In particular, we<br/>seek quantifiable evidence on how central testing is to the CI process, how strongly the project language...