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The Slow and The Furious? Performance Antipattern Detection in Cyber-Physical Systems

van Dinten, I. (author), Derakhshanfar, Pouria (author), Panichella, A. (author), Zaidman, A.E. (author)

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) have gained traction in recent years. A major non-functional quality of CPS is performance since it affects both usability and security. This critical quality attribute depends on the specialized hardware, simulation engines, and environmental factors that characterize the system under analysis. While a large body...

journal article 2024

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What is an app store? The software engineering perspective

Zhu, Wenhan (author), Proksch, S. (author), German, Daniel M. (author), Godfrey, Michael W. (author), Li, Li (author), McIntosh, Shane (author)

“App stores” are online software stores where end users may browse, purchase, download, and install software applications. By far, the best known app stores are associated with mobile platforms, such as Google Play for Android and Apple’s App Store for iOS. The ubiquity of smartphones has led to mobile app stores becoming a touchstone...

journal article 2024

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Enriching Source Code with Contextual Data for Code Completion Models: An Empirical Study

van Dam, Tim (author), Izadi, M. (author), van Deursen, A. (author)

Transformer-based pre-trained models have recently achieved great results in solving many software engineering tasks including automatic code completion which is a staple in a developer’s toolkit. While many have striven to improve the code-understanding abilities of such models, the opposite – making the code easier to understand – has not been...

conference paper 2023

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Multi-objective Black-box Test Case Prioritization based on Wordnet Distances

van Dinten, I. (author), Zaidman, A.E. (author), Panichella, A. (author)

Test case prioritization techniques have emerged as effective strategies to optimize this process and mitigate the regression testing costs. Commonly, black-box heuristics guide optimal test ordering, leveraging information retrieval (e.g., cosine distance) to measure the test case distance and sort them accordingly. However, a challenge...

conference paper 2023

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Continuous Integration and Delivery practices for Cyber-Physical systems: An interview-based study

Zampetti, Fiorelli (author), Tamburri, Damian A. (author), Panichella, Sebastiano (author), Panichella, A. (author), Di Penta, Massimiliano (author), Canfora, Gerardo (author)

Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) practices have shown several benefits for software development and operations, such as faster release cycles and early discovery of defects. For Cyber-Physical System (CPS) development, CI/CD can help achieving required goals, such as high dependability, yet it may be challenging to apply. This...

journal article 2022

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BotHunter: An Approach to Detect Software Bots in GitHub

Abdellatif, Ahmad (author), Wessel, Mairieli (author), Steinmacher, Igor (author), Gerosa, Marco A. (author), Shihab, Emad (author)

Bots have become popular in software projects as they play critical roles, from running tests to fixing bugs/vulnerabilities. However, the large number of software bots adds extra effort to practitioners and researchers to distinguish human accounts from bot accounts to avoid bias in data-driven studies. Researchers developed several...

conference paper 2022

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Challenges in Applying Continuous Experimentation: A Practitioners' Perspective

Anderson, K.S. (author), Visser, Denise (author), Mannen, Jan-Willem (author), Jiang, Yuxiang (author), van Deursen, A. (author)

Background: Applying Continuous Experimentation on a large scale is not easily achieved. Although the evolution within large tech organisations is well understood, we still lack a good understanding of how to transition a company towards applying more experiments. Objective: This study investigates how practitioners define, value and apply...

conference paper 2022

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Hybrid Multi-level Crossover for Unit Test Case Generation

Olsthoorn, Mitchell (author), Derakhshanfar, P. (author), Panichella, A. (author)

State-of-the-art search-based approaches for test case generation work at test case level, where tests are represented as sequences of statements. These approaches make use of genetic operators (i.e., mutation and crossover) that create test variants by adding, altering, and removing statements from existing tests. While this encoding schema has...

conference paper 2021

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Atoms of Confusion in Java

Langhout, Chris (author), Aniche, Maurício (author)

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...

conference paper 2021

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Logging Practices with Mobile Analytics: An Empirical Study on Firebase

Harty, Julian (author), Zhang, Haonan (author), Wei, Lili (author), Pascarella, L. (author), Aniche, Maurício (author), Shang, Weiyi (author)

Software logs are of great value in both industrial and open-source projects. Mobile analytics logging enables developers to collect logs remotely from their apps running on end user devices at the cost of recording and transmitting logs across the Internet to a centralised infrastructure.This paper makes a first step in characterising...

conference paper 2021

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Selecting third-party libraries: The practitioners' perspective

Larios Vargas, E. (author), Aniche, Maurício (author), Treude, Christoph (author), Bruntink, Magiel (author), Gousios, G. (author)

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...

conference paper 2020

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Investigating Severity Thresholds for Test Smells

Spadini, D. (author), Schvarcbacher, Martin (author), Oprescu, Ana (author), Bruntink, Magiel (author), Bacchelli, A. (author)

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...

conference paper 2020

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Search-Based Crash Reproduction and Its Impact on Debugging

Soltani, M. (author), Panichella, A. (author), van Deursen, A. (author)

Software systems fail. These failures are often reported to issue tracking systems, where they are prioritized and assigned to responsible developers to be investigated. When developers debug software, they need to reproduce the reported failure in order to verify whether their fix actually prevents the failure from happening again. Since...

journal article 2020

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The Adoption of JavaScript Linters in Practice: A Case Study on ESLint

Tómasdóttir, Kristín (author), Aniche, Maurício (author), van Deursen, A. (author)

A linter is a static analysis tool that warns software developers about possible code errors or violations to coding standards. By using such a tool, errors can be surfaced early in the development process when they are cheaper to fix. For a linter to be successful, it is important to understand the needs and challenges of developers when using...

journal article 2020

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Does reviewer recommendation help developers?

Kovalenko, V.V. (author), Tintarev, N. (author), Pasynkov, Evgeny (author), Bird, Christian (author), Bacchelli, A. (author)

Selecting reviewers for code changes is a critical step for an efficient code review process. Recent studies propose automated reviewer recommendation algorithms to support developers in this task. However, the evaluation of recommendation algorithms, when done apart from their target systems and users (i.e., code review tools and change...

journal article 2019

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Discovering Community Patterns in Open-Source: A Systematic Approach and Its Evaluation

Tamburri, Damian A. (author), Palomba, F. (author), Serebrenik, Alexander (author), Zaidman, A.E. (author)

“There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.” - [M. Scott Peck]<br/><br/>The open-source phenomenon has reached the point in which it is virtually impossible to find large applications that do not rely on it. Such grand adoption may...

journal article 2019

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Fine-grained just-in-time defect prediction

Pascarella, L. (author), Palomba, F. (author), Bacchelli, A. (author)

Defect prediction models focus on identifying defect-prone code elements, for example to allow practitioners to allocate testing resources on specific subsystems and to provide assistance during code reviews. While the research community has been highly active in proposing metrics and methods to predict defects on long-term periods (i.e.,at...

journal article 2019

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An Empirical Catalog of Code Smells for the Presentation Layer of Android Apps

Goularte Carvalho, Suelen (author), Aniche, Maurício (author), Veríssimo, Júlio (author), Durelli, Rafael (author), Gerosa, Marco Aurélio (author)

Software developers, including those of the Android mobile platform, constantly seek to improve their applications’ maintainability and evolvability. Code smells are commonly used for this purpose, as they indicate symptoms of design problems. However, although the literature presents a variety of code smells, such as God Class and Long...

journal article 2019

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Re-evaluating Method-Level Bug Prediction

Pascarella, L. (author), Palomba, F. (author), Bacchelli, A. (author)

Bug prediction is aimed at supporting developers in the identification of code artifacts more likely to be defective. Researchers have proposed prediction models to identify bug prone methods and provided promising evidence that it is possible to operate at this level of granularity. Particularly, models based on a mixture of product and process...

conference paper 2018

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

Spadini, D. (author), Aniche, Maurício (author), Bruntink, Magiel (author), Bacchelli, A. (author)

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...

journal article 2018