How Developers Engineer Test Cases: An Observational Study

One of the main challenges that developers face when testing their systems lies in engineering test cases that are good enough to reveal bugs. And while our body of knowledge on software testing and automated test case generation is already quite significant, in practice, developers are still the ones responsible for engineering test cases...

Evosuite at the SBST 2021 Tool Competition

EvoSuite is a search-based unit test generation tool for Java. This paper summarises the results and experiences of EvoSuite's participation at the ninth unit testing competition at SBST 2021, where EvoSuite achieved the highest overall score.

How Good Is Your Puppet?: An Empirically Defined and Validated Quality Model for Puppet

Puppet is a declarative language for configuration management that has rapidly gained popularity in recent years. Numerous organizations now rely on Puppet code for deploying their software systems onto cloud infrastructures. In this paper we provide a definition of code quality for Puppet code and an automated technique for measuring and rating...

The Scent of a Smell: An Extensive Comparison between Textual and Structural Smells

Code smells are symptoms of poor design or implementation choices that have a negative effect on several aspects of software maintenance and evolution, such as program comprehension or change- and fault-proneness. This is why researchers have spent a lot of effort on devising methods that help developers to automatically detect them in source...

Memory and Communication Profiling for Accelerator-Based Platforms

The growing demand of processing power is being satisfied mainly by an increase in the number of homogeneous and heterogeneous computing cores in a system. Efficient utilization of these architectures demands analysis of memory-access behaviour of applications and perform data-communication aware mapping of applications on these architectures....

Structure and Evolution of Package Dependency Networks

Software developers often include available open-source software packages into their projects to minimize redundant effort. However, adding a package to a project can also introduce risks, which can propagate through multiple levels of dependencies. Currently, not much is known about the structure of open-source package ecosystems of popular...

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...

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...