Related papers: Test them all, is it worth it? Assessing configura…

Background: Machine learning algorithms are widely used to predict defect prone software components. In this literature, computational experiments are the main means of evaluation, and the credibility of results depends on experimental…

An important aspect of many particle accelerators is the constant evolution and frequent configuration changes that are needed to perform the experiments they are designed for. This often leads to the design of configurable software that…

The cost of software maintenance often surpasses the initial development expenses, making it a significant concern for the software industry. A key strategy for alleviating future maintenance burdens is the early prediction and…

Modern programming languages (e.g., Java and C#) provide features to separate error-handling code from regular code, seeking to enhance software comprehensibility and maintainability. Nevertheless, the way exception handling (EH) code is…

Software is among the most complex endeavors of the human mind; large scale systems can have tens of millions of lines of source code. However, seldom is complexity measured above the lowest level of code, and sometimes source code files or…

Source code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development…

Nowadays, software systems tend to include Artificial Intelligence (AI) components. Changes in the operational environment have been known to negatively impact the stability of AI-enabled software systems by causing unintended changes in…

Software testing is a complex, intellectual activity based (at least) on analysis, reasoning, decision making, abstraction and collaboration performed in a highly demanding environment. Naturally, it uses and allocates multiple cognitive…

Neutral landscapes and mutational robustness are believed to be important enablers of evolvability in biology. We apply these concepts to software, defining mutational robustness to be the fraction of random mutations that leave a program's…

A classical heuristic in software testing is to reward diversity, which implies that a higher priority must be assigned to test cases that differ the most from those already prioritized. This approach is commonly known as similarity-based…

Automating the design of heuristic search methods is an active research field within computer science, artificial intelligence and operational research. In order to make these methods more generally applicable, it is important to eliminate…

Many researchers assume that, for software analytics, "more data is better." We write to show that, at least for learning defect predictors, this may not be true. To demonstrate this, we analyzed hundreds of popular GitHub projects. These…

Flaky tests are tests that nondeterministically pass and fail in unchanged code. These tests can be detrimental to developers' productivity. Particularly when tests run in continuous integration environments, the tests may be competing for…

One of the prerequisites of any organization is an unvarying sustainability in the dynamic and competitive industrial environment. Development of high quality software is therefore an inevitable constraint of any software industry. Defect…

Understanding how software defects manifest and evolve in production environments is critical for improving reliability. While previous research has largely focused on pre-release defects, the nature of residual faults, i.e., those escaping…

Dependency cycles pose a significant challenge to software quality and maintainability. However, there is limited understanding of how practitioners resolve dependency cycles in real-world scenarios. This paper presents an empirical study…

Test and evaluation is a necessary process for ensuring that engineered systems perform as intended under a variety of conditions, both expected and unexpected. In this work, we consider the unique challenges of developing a unifying test…

WebAssembly is increasingly used as the compilation target for cross-platform applications. In this paper, we investigate whether one can rely on the security measures enforced by existing C compilers when compiling C programs to…

Performance benchmarking is a common practice in software engineering, particularly when building large-scale, distributed, and data-intensive systems. While cloud environments offer several advantages for running benchmarks, it is often…

Refactoring is the process of restructuring existing code without changing its external behavior while improving its internal structure. Refactoring engines are integral components of modern Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and…