Related papers: Comprehending Test Code: An Empirical Study
Motivation: Code understandability is crucial in software development, as developers spend 58% to 70% of their time reading source code. Improving it can improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs. Problem: Experimental studies often…
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…
The relevance of code comprehension in a developer's daily work was recognized more than 40 years ago. Consequently, many experiments were conducted to find out how developers could be supported during code comprehension and which code…
Software is infamous for its poor quality and frequent occurrence of bugs. While there is no doubt that thorough testing is an appropriate answer to ensure sufficient quality, the poor state of software generally suggests that developers…
Unlike most other software quality attributes, testability cannot be evaluated solely based on the characteristics of the source code. The effectiveness of the test suite and the budget assigned to the test highly impact the testability of…
Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to…
Context: Application Programming Interface (API) code examples are an essential knowledge resource for learning APIs. However, a few user studies have explored how the structural characteristics of the source code in code examples impact…
Context. Refactoring has been widely investigated in the past in relation to production code quality, yet still little is known on how developers apply refactoring on test code. Specifically, there is still a lack of investigation into how…
Nowadays, software testing professionals are commonly required to develop coding skills to work on test automation. One essential skill required from those who code is the ability to implement code refactoring, a valued quality aspect of…
Understanding program code is a complicated endeavor. As such, myriad different factors can influence the outcome. Investigations of program comprehension, and in particular those using controlled experiments, have to take these factors…
In code comprehension experiments, participants are usually told at the beginning what kind of code comprehension task to expect. Describing experiment scenarios and experimental tasks will influence participants in ways that are sometimes…
What factors impact the comprehensibility of code? Previous research suggests that expectation-congruent programs should take less time to understand and be less prone to errors. We present an experiment in which participants with…
Effective software testing is critical for producing reliable and secure software, yet many computer science students struggle to master the foundational concepts required to construct comprehensive test suites. While automated feedback…
Unit testing is a vital part of the software development process and involves developers writing code to verify or assert production code. Furthermore, to help comprehend the test case and troubleshoot issues, developers have the option to…
Developers spend 70% of their time understanding code. Code that is easy to read can save time, while hard-to-read code can lead to the introduction of bugs. However, it is difficult to establish what makes code more understandable.…
Context: Software testability is the degree to which a software system or a unit under test supports its own testing. To predict and improve software testability, a large number of techniques and metrics have been proposed by both…
Proponents of software verification have argued that simpler code is easier to verify: that is, that verification tools issue fewer false positives and require less human intervention when analyzing simpler code. We empirically validate…
The readability of source code is key for understanding and maintaining software systems and tests. Several studies investigate the readability of source code, but there is limited research on the readability of test code and related…
Context. Considering the importance of software testing to the development of high quality and reliable software systems, this paper aims to investigate how can work-related factors influence the motivation of software testers. Method. We…
Most businesses rely on a significant stack of software to perform their daily operations. This software is business-critical as defects in this software have major impacts on revenue and customer satisfaction. The primary means for…