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,...

Revisiting Test Smells in Automatically Generated Tests: Limitations, Pitfalls, and Opportunities

Test smells attempt to capture design issues in test code that reduce their maintainability. Previous work found such smells to be highly common in automatically generated test-cases, but based this result on specific static detection rules; although these are based on the original definition of “test smells”, a recent empirical study showed...

Visualizing code and coverage changes for code review

One of the tasks of reviewers is to verify that code modifications are well tested. However, current tools offer little support in understanding precisely how changes to the code relate to changes to the tests. In particular, it is hard to see whether (modified) test code covers the changed code. To mitigate this problem, we developed OPERIAS...

On the Reaction to Deprecation of 25,357 Clients of 4+1 Popular Java APIs

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are a tremendous resource—that is, when they are stable. Several studies have shown that this is unfortunately not the case. Of those, a large-scale study of API changes in the Pharo Smalltalk<br/>ecosystem documented several findings about API deprecations and their impact on API clients. We conduct a...

fine-GRAPE: Fine-Grained APi usage Extractor An Approach and Dataset to Investigate API Usage

An Application Programming Interface (API) provides a specific set of functionalities to a developer, with the aim of enabling reuse. APIs have been investigated from different angles such as popularity usage and evolution, to get a better understanding of their various characteristics. For such studies software repositories are mined for API...