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Researchers, students and practitioners often encounter a situation when the build process of a third-party software system fails. In this paper, we aim to confirm this observation present mainly as anecdotal evidence so far. Using a…

Benchmarks of bugs are essential to empirically evaluate automatic program repair tools. In this paper, we present Bears, a project for collecting and storing bugs into an extensible bug benchmark for automatic repair studies in Java. The…

Nowadays, web services play a major role in the development of enterprise applications. Many such applications are now developed using a service-oriented architecture (SOA), where microservices is one of its most popular kind. A RESTful web…

Unit testing is an essential but resource-intensive step in software development, ensuring individual code units function correctly. This paper introduces AgoneTest, an automated evaluation framework for Large Language Model-generated (LLM)…

Build verifiability refers to the property that the build of a software system can be verified by independent third parties and it is crucial for the trustworthiness of a software system. Various efforts towards build verifiability have…

Automated tools for solving GitHub issues are receiving significant attention by both researchers and practitioners, e.g., in the form of foundation models and LLM-based agents prompted with issues. A crucial step toward successfully…

Mutation testing is used extensively to support the experimentation of software engineering studies. Its application to real-world projects is possible thanks to modern tools that automate the whole mutation analysis process. However,…

Software vulnerabilities are now reported at an unprecedented speed due to the recent development of automated vulnerability hunting tools. However, fixing vulnerabilities still mainly depends on programmers' manual efforts. Developers need…

Third-party libraries are a central building block to develop software systems. However, outdated third-party libraries are commonly used, and developers are usually less aware of the potential risks. Therefore, a quantitative and holistic…

During testing, developers can place oracles externally or internally with respect to a method. Given a faulty execution state, i.e., one that differs from the expected one, an oracle might be unable to expose the fault if it is placed at a…

Random testing (RT) is a well-studied testing method that has been widely applied to the testing of many applications, including embedded software systems, SQL database systems, and Android applications. Adaptive random testing (ART) aims…

Modern version control systems such as Git or SVN include bug tracking mechanisms, through which developers can highlight the presence of bugs through bug reports, i.e., textual descriptions reporting the problem and what are the steps that…

Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…

Rust aims to be a safe programming language applicable to systems programming applications. In particular, its type system has strong guardrails to prevent a variety of issues, such as memory safety bugs and data races. However, these…

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…

Test case maintainability is an important concern, especially in open source and distributed development environments where projects typically have high contributor turnover with varying backgrounds and experience, and where code ownership…

Mutation testing has been widely used to assess the fault-detection effectiveness of a test suite, as well as to guide test case generation or prioritization. Empirical studies have shown that, while mutants are generally representative of…

Finite-state models are ubiquitous in the study of concurrent systems, especially controllers and servers that operate in a repetitive cycle. In this paper, we show how to extract finite state models from a run of a multi-threaded Java…

Context: Static Application Security Testing Tools (SASTTs) identify software vulnerabilities to support the security and reliability of software applications. Interestingly, several studies have suggested that alternative solutions may be…

Mock assertions provide developers with a powerful means to validate program behaviors that are unobservable to test assertions. Despite their significance, they are rarely considered by automated test generation techniques. Effective…