Related papers: Using causal inference and Bayesian statistics to …

Software developers attempt to reproduce software bugs to understand their erroneous behaviours and to fix them. Unfortunately, they often fail to reproduce (or fix) them, which leads to faulty, unreliable software systems. However, to…

Context: Many studies consider the relation between individual aspects of the software engineering process and bug-introduction, e.g., software testing and code review. These studies typically only identify correlations between their set of…

In experimental causal inference, we distinguish between two sources of uncertainty: design uncertainty, due to the treatment assignment mechanism, and sampling uncertainty, when the sample is drawn from a super-population. This distinction…

A major challenge in testing software product lines is efficiency. In particular, testing a product line should take less effort than testing each and every product individually. We address this issue in the context of input-output…

Mutation testing is a means to assess the effectiveness of a test suite and its outcome is considered more meaningful than code coverage metrics. However, despite several optimizations, mutation testing requires a significant computational…

Coincidental correctness (CC) arises when a defective program produces the correct output despite the fact that the defect within was exercised. Researchers have recognized the negative impact of coincidental correctness, and the authors…

When interacting with their software systems, users may have to deal with problems like crashes, failures, and program instability. Faulty software running in the field is not only the consequence of ineffective in-house verification and…

Flaky tests are tests that can non-deterministically pass or fail, even in the absence of code changes.Despite being a source of false alarms, flaky tests often remain in test suites once they are detected, as they also may be relied upon…

Background: Noise, defined as an unwanted sound, is one of the commonest factors that could affect people's performance in their daily work activities. The software engineering research community has marginally investigated the effects of…

High-availability of software systems requires automated handling of crashes in presence of errors. Failure-oblivious computing is one technique that aims to achieve high availability. We note that failure-obliviousness has not been studied…

Among the many different kinds of program repair techniques, one widely studied family of techniques is called test suite based repair. Test-suites are in essence input-output specifications and are therefore typically inadequate for…

Fixing software faults contributes significantly to the cost of software maintenance and evolution. Techniques for reducing these costs require datasets of software faults, as well as an understanding of the faults, for optimal testing and…

In many scenarios, the observational data needed for causal inferences are spread over two data files. In particular, we consider scenarios where one file includes covariates and the treatment measured on one set of individuals, and a…

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…

One of the prerequisites of any organization is an unvarying sustainability in the dynamic and competitive industrial environment. Development of high quality software is therefore an inevitable constraint of any software industry. Defect…

Causal discovery procedures aim to deduce causal relationships among variables in a multivariate dataset. While various methods have been proposed for estimating a single causal model or a single equivalence class of models, less attention…

The use of asserts in code has received increasing attention in the software engineering community in the past few years, even though it has been a recognized programming construct for many decades. A previous empirical study by Casalnuovo…

Context. Software reusability mechanisms, like inheritance and delegation in Object-Oriented programming, are widely recognized as key instruments of software design. These are used to reduce the risks of source code being affected by…

Typical Node.js applications extensively rely on packages hosted in the npm registry. As such packages may be used by thousands of other packages or applications, it is important to assess their code coverage. Moreover, increasing code…

Open-source software supply chain security relies heavily on assessing affected versions of library vulnerabilities. While prior studies have leveraged exploits for verifying vulnerability affected versions, they point out a key limitation…