Perceived relevance of automatic code inspection in end-user development: A study on VBA

Microsoft VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is a programming language widely used by end-user programmers, often alongside the popular spreadsheet software Excel. Together they form the popular Excel-VBA application ecosystem. Despite being popular, spreadsheets are known to be fault-prone, and to minimize risk of faults in the overall...

Crash reproduction difficulty, an initial assessment

This study presents the initial step towards a thorough analysis of the difficulty to reproduce a crash using searchbased crash reproduction. Traditionally, code size and complexity are considered representative indicators of the difficulty for search-based approaches, like search-based unit test generation, to generate tests. However, unlike...

Code smells for Model-View-Controller architectures

Previous studies have shown the negative effects that low-quality code can have on maintainability proxies, such as code change- and defect-proneness. One of the symptoms for low-quality code are code smells, defined as sub-optimal implementation choices. While this definition is quite general and seems to suggest a wide spectrum of smells that...

How to Kill Them All: An Exploratory Study on the Impact of Code Observability on Mutation Testing

Mutation testing is well-known for its efficacy in assessing test quality, and starting to be applied in the industry. However, what should a developer do when confronted with a low mutation score? Should the test suite be plainly reinforced to increase the mutation score, or should the production code be improved as well, to make the...