State-of-the-practice in quality assurance in Java-based open source software development

To ensure the quality of software systems, software engineers can make use of a variety of quality assurance approaches, for example, software testing, modern code review, automated static analysis, and build automation. Each of these quality assurance practices have been studied in depth in isolation, but there is a clear knowledge gap when...

Quality Assurance Awareness in Open Source Software Projects on GitHub

Software engineers employ a variety of approaches to ensure the quality of software systems, including software testing, modern code review, automated static analysis, build automation, and continuous integration. To make effective decisions regarding quality assurance (QA), software engineers need to have an awareness of (1) the QA approaches...

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...

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...

A framework for quality assessment of just-in-time requirements: The case of open source feature requests

Until now, quality assessment of requirements has focused on traditional up-front requirements. Contrasting these traditional requirements are just-in-time (JIT) requirements, which are by definition incomplete, not specific and might be ambiguous when initially specified, indicating a different notion of "correctness." We analyze how the...

Automatic Test Case Generation: What If Test Code Quality Matters?

Test case generation tools that optimize code coverage have been extensively investigated. Recently, researchers have suggested to add other non-coverage criteria, such as mem- ory consumption or readability, to increase the practical use- fulness of generated tests. In this paper, we observe that test code quality metrics, and test cohesion and...

A Quality Framework for Agile Requirements: A Practitioner’s Perspective

Verification activities are necessary to ensure that the requirements are specified in a correct way. However, until now requirements verification research has focused on traditional up-front requirements. Agile or just-in-time requirements are by definition incomplete, not specific and might be ambiguous when initially specified, indicating a...