Related papers: Finding Bugs with Specification-Based Testing is E…

Bug finding tools can find defects in software source code us- ing an automated static analysis. This automation may be able to reduce the time spent for other testing and review activities. For this we need to have a clear understanding of…

Non-deterministically behaving test cases cause developers to lose trust in their regression test suites and to eventually ignore failures. Detecting flaky tests is therefore a crucial task in maintaining code quality, as it builds the…

Static analysis is one of the most widely adopted techniques to find software bugs before code is put in production. Designing and implementing effective and efficient static analyses is difficult and requires high expertise, which results…

Test bots are automated testing tools that autonomously and periodically run a set of test cases that check whether the system under test meets the requirements set forth by the customer. The automation decreases the amount of time a…

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,…

Context. Multiple automated techniques have been proposed and developed for mobile application GUI testing aiming to improve effectiveness, efficiency, and practicality. The effectiveness, efficiency, and practicality are 3 fundamental…

Test-driven development (TDD) is the practice of writing tests first and coding later, and the proponents of TDD expound its numerous benefits. For instance, given an issue on a source code repository, tests can clarify the desired behavior…

Formal verification provides a rigorous and systematic approach to ensure the correctness and reliability of software systems. Yet, constructing specifications for the full proof relies on domain expertise and non-trivial manpower. In view…

Modern software relies on a multitude of automated testing and quality assurance tools to prevent errors, bugs and potential vulnerabilities. This study sets out to provide a head-to-head, quantitative and qualitative evaluation of six…

Static analysis is the process of analyzing software code without executing the software. It can help find bugs and potential problems in software that may only appear at runtime. Although many static analysis tools have been developed for…

Validation is a central activity when developing formal specifications. Similarly to coding, a possible validation technique is to define upfront test cases or scenarios that a future specification should satisfy or not. Unfortunately,…

Context: Issue tracking systems are used to track and describe tasks in the development process, e.g., requested feature improvements or reported bugs. However, past research has shown that the reported issue types often do not match the…

In games, and more generally in the field of software development, early detection of bugs is vital to maintain a high quality of the final product. Automated tests are a powerful tool that can catch a problem earlier in development by…

The prevalence of software systems has become an integral part of modern-day living. Software usage has increased significantly, leading to its growth in both size and complexity. Consequently, software development is becoming a more…

Software systems have been continuously evolved and delivered with high quality due to the widespread adoption of automated tests. A recurring issue hurting this scenario is the presence of flaky tests, a test case that may pass or fail…

In the past couple of decades, significant research efforts have been devoted to the prediction of software bugs (i.e., defects). In general, these works leverage a diverse set of metrics, tools, and techniques to predict which classes,…

Flaky tests are software tests that exhibit a seemingly random outcome (pass or fail) when run against the same, identical code. Previous work has examined fixes to flaky tests and has proposed automated solutions to locate as well as fix…

Machine learning is nowadays a standard technique for data analysis within software applications. Software engineers need quality assurance techniques that are suitable for these new kinds of systems. Within this article, we discuss the…

Static analysis plays a crucial role in software vulnerability detection, yet faces a persistent precision-scalability tradeoff. In large codebases like the Linux kernel, traditional static analysis tools often generate excessive false…

Test-based automated program repair has been a prolific field of research in software engineering in the last decade. Many approaches have indeed been proposed, which leverage test suites as a weak, but affordable, approximation to program…