Training a Machine-Learning Model for Optimal Fitness Function Selection with the Aim of Finding Bugs

To ensure that a software system operates in the correct way, it is crucial to test it extensively. Manual software testing is severely time-consuming, and developers often underestimate its importance. Consequently, many tools for automatic test generation have been developed during the past decade. EvoSuite is a state-of-the-art tool for...

Blockchain verification and validation: Techniques, challenges, and research directions

As blockchain technology is gaining popularity in industry and society, solutions for Verification and Validation (V&V) of blockchain-based software applications (BC-Apps) have started gaining equal attention. To ensure that BC-Apps are properly developed before deployment, it is paramount to apply systematic V&V to verify their...

Spreadsheet testing in practice

Despite being popular end-user tools, spreadsheets suffer from the vulnerability of error-proneness. In software engineering, testing has been proposed as a way to address errors. It is important therefore to know whether spreadsheet users also test, or how do they test and to what extent, especially since most spreadsheet users do not have...

Oops, My Tests Broke the Build: An Explorative Analysis of Travis CI with GitHub

AbContinuous Integration (CI) has become a best practice of modern software development. Yet, at present, we have a shortfall of insight into the testing practices that are common in CI-based software development. In particular, we<br/>seek quantifiable evidence on how central testing is to the CI process, how strongly the project language...

TravisTorrent: Synthesizing Travis CI and GitHub for Full-Stack Research on Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) has become a best practice of modern software development. Thanks in part to its tight integration with GitHub, Travis CI has emerged as arguably the most widely used CI platform for Open-Source Software (OSS) development. However, despite its prominent role in Software Engineering in practice, the benefits, costs,...

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...