Supporting Quality In Test Code For Higher Quality Software Systems

Automated testing has become an essential process for improving the quality of software systems. Automated tests can help ensure that production code is robust under many usage conditions and that code meets performance and security needs. Nevertheless, writing effective tests is challenging and, unfortunately, often neglected. In the first part...

Primers or Reminders?: The Effects of Existing Review Comments on Code Review

In contemporary code review, the comments put by reviewers on a specific code change are immediately visible to the other reviewers involved. Could this visibility prime new reviewers' attention (due to the human's proneness to availability bias), thus biasing the code review outcome In this study, we investigate this topic by conducting a...

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...

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...

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...

Practices and Tools for Better Software Testing

Automated testing (hereafter referred to as just ‘testing’) has become an essential process for improving the quality of software systems. In fact, testing can help to point out defects and to ensure that production code is robust under many usage conditions. However, writing and maintaining high-quality test code is challenging and frequently...

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...

PyDriller: Python Framework for Mining Software Repositories

Software repositories contain historical and valuable information about the overall development of software systems. Mining software repositories (MSR) is nowadays considered one of the most interesting growing fields within software engineering. MSR focuses on extracting and analyzing data available in software repositories to uncover...

Software Analytics in Continuous Delivery: A Case Study on Success Factors

Background: During the period of one year, ING developed an approach for software analytics within an environment of a large number of software engineering teams working in a Continuous Delivery as a Service setting. Goal: Our objective is to examine what factors helped and hindered the implementation of software analytics in such an environment...

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...