Test Smells 20 Years Later: Detectability, Validity, and Reliability

Test smells aim to capture design issues in test code that reduces its maintainability. These have been extensively studied and generally found quite prevalent in both human-written and automatically generated test-cases. However, most evidence of prevalence is based on specific static detection rules. Although those are based on the original,...

Why and How JavaScript Developers Use Linters

Automatic static analysis tools help developers to automatically spot code issues in their software. They can be of extreme value in languages with dynamic characteristics, such as JavaScript, where developers can easily introduce mistakes which can go unnoticed for a long time, e.g., a simple syntactic or spelling mistake. Although research has...

A Validated Set of Smells in Model-View-Controller Architectures

Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices that may hinder code comprehension, and possibly increase change-and defect-proneness. A vast catalogue of smells has been defined in the literature, and it includes smells that can be found in any kind of system (e.g., God Classes), regardless of their architecture. On the other...

Can We Predict Types of Code Changes? An Empirical Analysis

Preprint of paper published in: 9th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 2-3 June 2012; doi:10.1109/MSR.2012.6224284 There exist many approaches that help in pointing developers to the change-prone parts of a software system. Although beneficial, they mostly fall short in providing details of these changes. Fine-grained...

Dead code elimination for web applications written in dynamic languages

Dead code is source code that is not necessary for the correct execution of an application. Dead code is a result of software ageing. It is a threat for maintainability and should therefore be removed. Many organizations in the web domain have the problem that their software grows and demands increasingly more effort to maintain, test, check out...

Aiding Software Developers to Test with TestNForce

Regression testing is an expensive process because, most of times, all the available test cases are executed. Many techniques of test selection/filtering have been researched and implemented, each having its own strong and weak points. This paper introduces a tool that helps developers and testers to identify the tests that need to be executed...

Evaluating Dynamic Analysis Techniques for Program Comprehension

Program comprehension is an essential part of software development and software maintenance, as software must be sufficiently understood before it can be properly modified. One of the common approaches in getting to understand a program is the study of its execution, also known as dynamic analysis. While many such approaches have been proposed...

JRET: A tool for the reconstruction of sequence diagrams from program executions

As opposed to static analysis, in which source code is inspected in order to increase program understanding, dynamic analysis concerns the actual execution of a program and the collection of runtime data. Several strategies to retrieve dynamic information exist, including source code instrumentation and the use of a customized debugger. Since...

Studying Co-evolution of Production and Test Code Using Association Rule Mining

Unit testing is generally accepted as an aid to produce high quality code, and can provide quick feedback to developers on the quality of the software. To have a high quality and well maintained test suite requires the production and test code to synchronously co-evolve, as added or changed production code should be tested as soon as possible....