Do as i Do, Not as i Say: Do Contribution Guidelines Match the GitHub Contribution Process?

Developer contribution guidelines are used in social coding sites like GitHub to explain and shape the process a project expects contributors to follow. They set standards for all participants and 'save time and hassle caused by improperly created pull requests or issues that have to be rejected and re-submitted' (GitHub). Yet, we lack a...

When Testing Meets Code Review: Why and How Developers Review Tests

Automated testing is considered an essential process for ensuring software quality. However, writing and maintaining high-quality test code is challenging and frequently considered of secondary importance. For production code, many open source and industrial software projects employ code review, a well-established software quality practice, but...

Work Practices and Challenges in Pull-Based Development: The Contributor’s Perspective

The pull-based development model is an emerging way of contributing to distributed software projects that is gaining enormous popularity within the open source software (OSS) world. Previous work has examined this model by focusing on projects and their owners-we complement it by examining the work practices of project contributors and the...

Automated detection of test fixture strategies and smells

Paper accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, IEEE Computer Society, 18-22 March 2013, ISBN 978-1-4673-5961-0, doi: 10.1109/ICST.2013.45 Designing automated tests is a challenging task. One important concern is how to design test fixtures, i.e. code that...

Test Confessions: A Study of Testing Practices for Plug-in Systems

Testing plug-in-based systems is challenging due to complex interactions among many different plug-ins, and variations in version and configuration. The objective of this paper is to increase our understanding of what testers and developers think and do when it comes to testing plug-inbased systems. To that end, we conduct a qualitative ...