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With the advent of powerful neural language models, AI-based systems to assist developers in coding tasks are becoming widely available; Copilot is one such system. Copilot uses Codex, a large language model (LLM), to complete code…
Unit tests are widely used to check source code quality, but they can be too coarse-grained or ill-suited for testing individual program statements. We introduce inline tests to make it easier to check for faults in statements. We motivate…
Context: Software development projects increasingly adopt unit testing as a way to identify and correct program faults early in the construction process. Code that is unit tested should therefore have fewer failures associated with it.…
The common use case of code smells assumes causality: Identify a smell, remove it, and by doing so improve the code. We empirically investigate their fitness to this use. We present a list of properties that code smells should have if they…
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…
Unit testing has been considered as having a key role in building high quality software, and therefore it has been widely used in practice. However, data on the relationship between unit testing and aspects of software quality remain…
Software testing is a mandatory activity in any serious software development process, as bugs are a reality in software development. This raises the question of quality: good tests are effective in finding bugs, but until a test case…
Build scripts automate the process of compiling source code, managing dependencies, running tests, and packaging software into deployable artifacts. These scripts are ubiquitous in modern software development pipelines for streamlining…
Most modern software systems are characterized by a high number of components whose interactions can affect and complicate testing activities. During testing, developers can account for the interactions by isolating the code under test…
Software testing is a critical element of software quality assurance and represents the ultimate review of specification, design and coding. Software testing is the process of testing the functionality and correctness of software by running…
In this paper, we propose a testing framework for validating sanitizer implementations in compilers. Our core components are (1) a program generator specifically designed for producing programs containing undefined behavior (UB), and (2) a…
Static bug finders have been widely-adopted by developers to find bugs in real world software projects. They leverage predefined heuristic static analysis rules to scan source code or binary code of a software project, and report violations…
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…
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…
Automated unit test generators, particularly search-based software testing tools like EvoSuite, are capable of generating tests with high coverage. Although these generators alleviate the burden of writing unit tests, they often pose…
Testing is an essential quality activity in the software development process. Usually, a software system is tested on several levels, starting with unit testing that checks the smallest parts of the code until acceptance testing, which is…
Unit testing is a commonly-used approach in software engineering to test the correctness and robustness of written code. Unit tests are tests designed to test small components of a codebase in isolation, such as an individual function or…
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…
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…
Software testing is sometimes plagued with intermittently failing tests and finding the root causes of such failing tests is often difficult. This problem has been widely studied at the unit testing level for open source software, but there…