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...

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...

Learning Off-By-One Mistakes: An Empirical Study

Mistakes in binary conditions are a source of error in many software systems. They happen when developers use, e.g., < or > instead of <= or >=. These boundary mistakes are hard to find and impose manual, labor-intensive work for software developers. While previous research has been proposing solutions to identify errors in boundary...