Related papers: An Empirical Study on Failed Error Propagation in …

Despite much recent interest in compiler randomized testing (fuzzing), the practical impact of fuzzer-found compiler bugs on real-world applications has barely been assessed. We present the first quantitative and qualitative study of the…

Incremental and parallel builds are crucial features of modern build systems. Parallelism enables fast builds by running independent tasks simultaneously, while incrementality saves time and computing resources by processing the build…

We present a novel approach to detect refactoring opportunities by measuring the participation of references between types in instances of patterns representing design flaws. This technique is validated using an experiment where we analyse…

Effective unit tests can help guard and improve software quality but require a substantial amount of time and effort to write and maintain. A unit test consists of a test prefix and a test oracle. Synthesizing test oracles, especially…

Software dependence networks are shown to be scale-free and asymmetric. We then study how software components are affected by the failure of one of them, and the inverse problem of locating the faulty component. Software at all levels is…

Testing deep learning-based systems is crucial but challenging due to the required time and labor for labeling collected raw data. To alleviate the labeling effort, multiple test selection methods have been proposed where only a subset of…

Automated test generators, such as search based software testing (SBST) techniques, replace the tedious and expensive task of manually writing test cases. SBST techniques are effective at generating tests with high code coverage. However,…

In order to plan for failure recovery, the designers of cloud systems need to understand how their system can potentially fail. Unfortunately, analyzing the failure behavior of such systems can be very difficult and time-consuming, due to…

Programming languages often demarcate the internal sandbox, consisting of entities such as objects and variables, from the outside world, e.g., files or network. Although communication with the external world poses fundamental challenges…

Generating code from a natural language programming task is one of the most successful applications of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, the generated program may be buggy. Without an oracle, such as an existing, correct implementation or…

A natural method to evaluate the effectiveness of a testing technique is to measure the defect detection rate when applying the created test cases. Here, real or artificial software defects can be injected into the source code of software.…

Software reliability models are one of the most generally used mathematical tool for estimation of reliability, failure rate and number of remaining faults in the software. Existing software reliability models are designed to follow…

Software testing is an essential part of the software development cycle to improve the code quality. Typically, a unit test consists of a test prefix and a test oracle which captures the developer's intended behaviour. A known limitation of…

Programming courses can be challenging for first year university students, especially for those without prior coding experience. Students initially struggle with code syntax, but as more advanced topics are introduced across a semester, the…

Software design smells are design attributes which violate the fundamental design principles. Design smells are a key cause of design debt. Although the activities of design smell identification and measurement are predominantly considered…

Even competent programmers make mistakes. Automatic verification can detect errors, but leaves the frustrating task of finding the erroneous line of code to the user. This paper presents an automatic approach for identifying potential error…

Software applications integrate more and more open-source software (OSS) to benefit from code reuse. As a drawback, each vulnerability discovered in bundled OSS potentially affects the application. Upon the disclosure of every new…

Following code style conventions in software projects is essential for maintaining overall code quality. Adhering to these conventions improves maintainability, understandability, and extensibility. Additionally, following best practices…

Defect prediction plays a crucial role in software engineering, enabling developers to identify defect-prone code and improve software quality. While extensive research has focused on refining machine learning models for defect prediction,…

Automatically detecting software failures is an important task and a longstanding challenge. It requires finding failure-inducing test cases whose test input can trigger the software's fault, and constructing an automated oracle to detect…