Renovation of idiomatic crosscutting concerns in embedded systems

Crosscutting concerns are phenomena that are present in almost any (embedded) software system. They arise if the implementation of a concern "a requirement or design decision" does not fit neatly into the modular decomposition of a software system. A crosscutting concern cannot be confined to a single modular unit and therefore becomes scattered...

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...

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...

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...

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...