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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…

Benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) often rely on rubric-scented prompts that request visible reasoning and strict formatting, whereas real deployments demand terse, contract-bound answers. We investigate whether such "evaluation…

Developers always wish to ensure that their latest changes to the code base do not break existing functionality. If test cases fail, they expect these failures to be connected to the submitted changes. Unfortunately, a flaky test can be the…

We gained insight into ideas and beliefs on testing of students who finished an introductory course on programming without any formal education on testing. We asked students to fill in a small survey, to do four exercises and to fill in a…

Non-deterministically passing and failing test cases, so-called flaky tests, have recently become a focus area of software engineering research. While this research focus has been met with some enthusiastic endorsement from industry, prior…

Elixir is a new functional programming language whose popularity is rising in the industry. However, there are few works in the literature focused on studying the internal quality of systems implemented in this language. Particularly, to…

Code smells are characteristics of the software that indicates a code or design problem which can make software hard to understand, evolve, and maintain. The code smell detection tools proposed in the literature produce different results,…

Testing plays an important role in securing the success of a software development project. Prior studies have demonstrated beneficial effects of applying acceptance testing within a Behavioural-Driven Development method. In this research,…

Code smells indicate software design problems that harm software quality. Data-intensive systems that frequently access databases often suffer from SQL code smells besides the traditional smells. While there have been extensive studies on…

For large software applications, running the whole test suite after each code change is time- and resource-intensive. Regression test selection techniques aim at reducing test execution time by selecting only the tests that are affected by…

Code smells are symptoms of potential code quality problems that may affect software maintainability, thus increasing development costs and impacting software reliability. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities for…

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…

Context: Research software is essential for developing advanced tools and models to solve complex research problems and drive innovation across domains. Therefore, it is essential to ensure its correctness. Software testing plays a vital…

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…

During lab studies of text entry methods it is typical to observer very few errors in participants' typing - users tend to type very carefully in labs. This is a problem when investigating methods to support error awareness or correction as…

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…

As software systems continue to grow in complexity, testing has become a fundamental part of ensuring the quality and reliability of software products. Yet, software testing is still often perceived, both in industry and academia, as a…

Object-oriented code smells are well-known concepts in software engineering that refer to bad design and development practices commonly observed in software systems. With the emergence of mobile apps, new classes of code smells have been…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate software artifacts, such as source code, tests, and trace links. Requirements play a central role in shaping the input prompts that guide LLMs, as they are often used as part of…

High data quality is fundamental for today's AI-based systems. However, although data quality has been an object of research for decades, there is a clear lack of research on potential data quality issues (e.g., ambiguous, extraneous…