Related papers: Testability Refactoring in Pull Requests: Patterns…

Test smells can reduce the developers' ability to interact with the test code. Refactoring test code offers a safe strategy to handle test smells. However, the manual refactoring activity is not a trivial process, and it is often tedious…

Despite the immense popularity of the Automated Program Repair (APR) field, the question of patch validation is still open. Most of the present-day approaches follow the so-called Generate-and-Validate approach, where first a candidate…

This Innovative Practice full paper explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance the teaching of code refactoring in software engineering courses through real-time, context-aware feedback. Refactoring improves code quality but is…

In software engineering, impact analysis involves predicting the software elements (e.g., modules, classes, methods) potentially impacted by a change in the source code. Impact analysis is required to optimize the testing effort. In this…

Background: Test flakiness is identified as a major issue that compromises the regression testing process of complex software systems. Flaky tests manifest non-deterministic behaviour, send confusing signals to developers, and break their…

It is necessary to gather real refactoring instances while conducting empirical studies on refactoring. However, existing refactoring detection approaches are insufficient in terms of their accuracy and coverage. Reducing the manual effort…

Code review is a popular practice where developers critique each others' changes. Since automated builds can identify low-level issues (e.g., syntactic errors, regression bugs), it is not uncommon for software organizations to incorporate…

Instead of repeatedly re-analyzing from scratch, an incremental static analysis only analyzes a codebase once completely, and then it updates the previous results based on the code changes. While this sounds promising to achieve speed-ups,…

Code generation models have achieved impressive performance. However, they tend to be brittle as slight edits to a prompt could lead to very different generations; these robustness properties, critical for user experience when deployed in…

Formal verification of a software system relies on formalising the requirements to which it should adhere, which can be challenging. While formalising requirements from natural-language, we have dependencies that lead to duplication of…

For large software systems, refactoring activities can be a challenging task, since for keeping component complexity under control the overall architecture as well as many details of each component have to be considered. Product metrics are…

In the literature, there is a rather clear segregation between manually written tests by developers and automatically generated ones. In this paper, we explore a third solution: to automatically improve existing test cases written by…

Declarative styles such as functional programming (FP) are rapidly gaining ground on their imperative cousins, including procedural and object-oriented programming. The shift is subtle because it is happening within the context of…

To remain useful for their users, software systems need to continuously enhance and extend their functionality. Nevertheless, in many object-oriented applications, features are not represented explicitly. The lack of modularization is known…

Software refactoring plays an important role in increasing code quality. One of the most popular refactoring types is the Move Method refactoring. It is usually applied when a method depends more on members of other classes than on its own…

Automated test case generation is important. However, the automatically generated test input does not always make sense, and the automated assertion is difficult to validate against the program under test. In this paper, we propose…

Well structured and readable source code is a pre-requisite for maintainable software and successful collaboration among developers. Static analysis enables the automated extraction of code complexity and readability metrics which can be…

Testing has become an indispensable activity of software development, yet writing good and relevant tests remains a quite challenging task. One well-known problem is that it often is impossible or unrealistic to test for every outcome, as…

Unit testing is an essential activity in software development for verifying the correctness of software components. However, manually writing unit tests is challenging and time-consuming. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers…

Automated batch refactoring has become a de-facto mechanism to restructure software that may have significant design flaws negatively impacting the code quality and maintainability. Although automated batch refactoring techniques are known…