The Slow and The Furious? Performance Antipattern Detection in Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) have gained traction in recent years. A major non-functional quality of CPS is performance since it affects both usability and security. This critical quality attribute depends on the specialized hardware, simulation engines, and environmental factors that characterize the system under analysis. While a large body...

Enriching Source Code with Contextual Data for Code Completion Models: An Empirical Study

Transformer-based pre-trained models have recently achieved great results in solving many software engineering tasks including automatic code completion which is a staple in a developer’s toolkit. While many have striven to improve the code-understanding abilities of such models, the opposite – making the code easier to understand – has not been...

Multi-objective Black-box Test Case Prioritization based on Wordnet Distances

Test case prioritization techniques have emerged as effective strategies to optimize this process and mitigate the regression testing costs. Commonly, black-box heuristics guide optimal test ordering, leveraging information retrieval (e.g., cosine distance) to measure the test case distance and sort them accordingly. However, a challenge...

BotHunter: An Approach to Detect Software Bots in GitHub

Bots have become popular in software projects as they play critical roles, from running tests to fixing bugs/vulnerabilities. However, the large number of software bots adds extra effort to practitioners and researchers to distinguish human accounts from bot accounts to avoid bias in data-driven studies. Researchers developed several...

Recommending Log Placement Based on Code Vocabulary

Logging is a common practice of vital importance that enables developers to collect runtime information from a system. This information is then used to monitor a system's performance as it runs in production and to detect the cause of system failures. Besides its importance, logging is still a manual and difficult process. Developers rely on...

Investigating Severity Thresholds for Test Smells

Test smells are poor design decisions implemented in test code, which can have an impact on the effectiveness and maintainability of unit tests. Even though test smell detection tools exist, how to rank the severity of the detected smells is an open research topic. In this work, we aim at investigating the severity rating for four test smells...

Search-Based Crash Reproduction and Its Impact on Debugging

Software systems fail. These failures are often reported to issue tracking systems, where they are prioritized and assigned to responsible developers to be investigated. When developers debug software, they need to reproduce the reported failure in order to verify whether their fix actually prevents the failure from happening again. Since...

Fine-grained just-in-time defect prediction

Defect prediction models focus on identifying defect-prone code elements, for example to allow practitioners to allocate testing resources on specific subsystems and to provide assistance during code reviews. While the research community has been highly active in proposing metrics and methods to predict defects on long-term periods (i.e.,at...

Mock objects for testing java systems: Why and how developers use them, and how they evolve

When testing software artifacts that have several dependencies, one has the possibility of either instantiating these dependencies or using mock objects to simulate the dependencies’ expected behavior. Even though recent quantitative studies showed that mock objects are widely used both in open source and proprietary projects, scientific...

Adaptive User Feedback for IR-Based Traceability Recovery

Trace ability recovery allows software engineers to understand the interconnections among software artefacts and, thus, it provides an important support to software maintenance activities. In the last decade, Information Retrieval (IR) has been widely adopted as core technology of semi-automatic tools to extract trace ability links between...