Selecting third-party libraries: The practitioners' perspective

The selection of third-party libraries is an essential element of virtually any software development project. However, deciding which libraries to choose is a challenging practical problem. Selecting the wrong library can severely impact a software project in terms of cost, time, and development effort, with the severity of the impact depending...

Investigating Severity Thresholds for Test Smells

Test smells are poor design decisions implemented in test code, which can have an impact on the effectiveness and maintainability of unit tests. Even though test smell detection tools exist, how to rank the severity of the detected smells is an open research topic. In this work, we aim at investigating the severity rating for four test smells...

The effects of change decomposition on code review—a controlled experiment

Background: Code review is a cognitively demanding and time-consuming process. Previous qualitative studies hinted at how decomposing change sets into multiple yet internally coherent ones would improve the reviewing process. So far, literature provided no quantitative analysis of this hypothesis.<br/>Aims: (1) Quantitatively measure the effects...

Test-Driven Code Review: An Empirical Study

Test-Driven Code Review (TDR) is a code review practice in which a reviewer inspects a patch by examining the changed test code before the changed production code. Although this practice has been mentioned positively by practitioners in informal literature and interviews, there is no systematic knowledge of its effects, prevalence, problems, and...

The Delta Maintainability Model: Measuring Maintainability of Fine-Grained Code Changes

Existing maintainability models are used to identify technical debt of software systems. Targeting entire codebases, such models lack the ability to determine shortcomings of smaller, fine-grained changes. This paper proposes a new maintainability model – the Delta Maintainability Model (DMM) – to measure fine-grained code changes, such as...

Classifying code comments in Java software systems

Code comments are a key software component containing information about the underlying implementation. Several studies have shown that code comments enhance the readability of the code. Nevertheless, not all the comments have the same goal and target audience. In this paper, we investigate how 14 diverse Java open and closed source software...

Investigating developer perception on test smells using better code hub - Work in progress -

Test smells can be found in test code using a variety of tools. In this paper, we present our integration of a test smell detection tool into Better Code Hub (BCH), an online environment for monitoring code quality and identifying problems in it. We extended BCH with test smell detection and observe how developers react to various instances...

Information Needs in Contemporary Code Review

Contemporary code review is a widespread practice used by software engineers to maintain high software quality and share project knowledge. However, conducting proper code review takes time and developers often have limited time for review. In this paper, we aim at investigating the information that reviewers need<br/>to conduct a proper code...

When Testing Meets Code Review: Why and How Developers Review Tests

Automated testing is considered an essential process for ensuring software quality. However, writing and maintaining high-quality test code is challenging and frequently considered of secondary importance. For production code, many open source and industrial software projects employ code review, a well-established software quality practice, but...

Enabling Real-Time Feedback in Software Engineering

Modern software projects consist of more than just code: teams follow development processes, the code runs on servers or mobile phones and produces run time logs and users talk about the software in forums like StackOverflow and Twitter and rate it on app stores. Insights stemming from the real-time analysis of combined software engineering data...

Mock objects for testing java systems: Why and how developers use them, and how they evolve

When testing software artifacts that have several dependencies, one has the possibility of either instantiating these dependencies or using mock objects to simulate the dependencies’ expected behavior. Even though recent quantitative studies showed that mock objects are widely used both in open source and proprietary projects, scientific...

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...

To Mock or Not To Mock?: An Empirical Study on Mocking Practices

When writing automated unit tests, developers often deal with software artifacts that have several dependencies. In these cases, one has the possibility of either instantiating the dependencies or using mock objects to simulate the dependencies' expected behavior. Even though recent quantitative studies showed that mock objects are widely used...

A security perspective on code review: The case of Chromium

Modern Code Review (MCR) is an established software development process that aims to improve software quality. Although evidence showed that higher levels of review coverage relates to less post-release bugs, it remains unknown the effectiveness of MCR at specifically finding security issues. We present a work we conduct aiming to fill that gap...