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Background: Test smells indicate potential problems in the design and implementation of automated software tests that may negatively impact test code maintainability, coverage, and reliability. When poorly described, manual tests written in…

Manual testing, in which testers follow natural language instructions to validate system behavior, remains crucial for uncovering issues not easily captured by automation. However, these test cases often suffer from test smells, quality…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Keila Lucas , Rohit Gheyi , Márcio Ribeiro , Fabio Palomba , Luana Martins , Elvys Soares

In large-scale embedded system development, requirement and test specifications are often expressed in natural language. In the context of developing such products, requirement review is performed in many cases manually using these…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Kostadin Rajkovic , Eduard Enoiu

Test smells are defined as sub-optimal design choices developers make when implementing test cases. Hence, similar to code smells, the research community has produced numerous test smell detection tools to investigate the impact of test…

Requirements form the basis for defining software systems' obligations and tasks. Testable requirements help prevent failures, reduce maintenance costs, and make it easier to perform acceptance tests. However, despite the importance of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-27 Morteza Zakeri-Nasrabadi , Saeed Parsa

Developing test code may be a time-consuming task that usually requires much effort and cost, especially when it is done manually. Besides, during this process, developers and testers are likely to adopt bad design choices, which may lead…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-03-13 Nildo Silva Junior , Larissa Rocha , Luana Almeida Martins , Ivan Machado

Context: Test smells are symptoms of sub-optimal design choices adopted when developing test cases. Previous studies have proved their harmfulness for test code maintainability and effectiveness. Therefore, researchers have been proposing…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-08-17 Valeria Pontillo , Dario Amoroso d'Aragona , Fabiano Pecorelli , Dario Di Nucci , Filomena Ferrucci , Fabio Palomba

Context: To reduce manual effort of extracting test cases from natural-language requirements, many approaches based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been proposed in the literature. Given the large amount of approaches in this…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-03-25 Vahid Garousi , Sara Bauer , Michael Felderer

Similarly to production code, code smells also occur in test code, where they are called test smells. Test smells have a detrimental effect not only on test code but also on the production code that is being tested. To date, the majority of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-08-11 Tongjie Wang , Yaroslav Golubev , Oleg Smirnov , Jiawei Li , Timofey Bryksin , Iftekhar Ahmed

Use case modeling is very popular to represent the functionality of the system to be developed, and it consists of two parts: use case diagram and use case description. Use case descriptions are written in structured natural language (NL),…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-09-04 Yotaro Seki , Shinpei Hayashi , Motoshi Saeki

CONTEXT: There has been a rapid growth in the use of data analytics to underpin evidence-based software engineering. However the combination of complex techniques, diverse reporting standards and poorly understood underlying phenomena are…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-04-16 Tim Menzies , Martin Shepperd

Requirement specifications are typically written in natural language (NL) due to its usability across multiple domains and understandability by all stakeholders. However, unstructured NL is prone to quality problems (e.g., ambiguity) when…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Alvaro Veizaga , Seung Yeob Shin , Lionel C. Briand

Test smells are coding issues that typically arise from inadequate practices, a lack of knowledge about effective testing, or deadline pressures to complete projects. The presence of test smells can negatively impact the maintainability and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Keila Lucas , Rohit Gheyi , Elvys Soares , Márcio Ribeiro , Ivan Machado

Context: Logging is an important part of modern software projects; logs are used in several tasks such as debugging and testing. Due to the complex nature of logging, it remains a difficult task with several pitfalls that could have serious…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Nyyti Saarimäki , Donghwan Shin , Domenico Bianculli

Test smells arise from poor design practices and insufficient domain knowledge, which can lower the quality of test code and make it harder to maintain and update. Manually refactoring test smells is time-consuming and error-prone,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Yi Gao , Xing Hu , Xiaohu Yang , Xin Xia

Test smells indicate poor development practices in test code, reducing maintainability and reliability. While developers often struggle to prevent or refactor these issues, existing tools focus primarily on detection rather than automated…

Test smells are known as bad development practices that reflect poor design and implementation choices in software tests. Over the last decade, test smells were heavily studied to measure their prevalence and impacts on test…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Renaud Rwemalika , Sarra Habchi , Mike Papadakis , Yves Le Traon , Marie-Claude Brasseur

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained massive popularity in recent years and are increasingly integrated into software systems for diverse purposes. However, poorly integrating them in source code may undermine software system quality.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Brahim Mahmoudi , Zacharie Chenail-Larcher , Naouel Moha , Quentin Stiévenart , Florent Avellaneda

The Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in code-related tasks. However, most research focuses on improving the output quality of LLMs (e.g., correctness), and less attention has been paid to the LLM input (e.g.,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Zhipeng Xue , Xiaoting Zhang , Zhipeng Gao , Xing Hu , Shan Gao , Xin Xia , Shanping Li

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,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-02-11 Thirupathi Guggulothu
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