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Related papers: Automated Unit Test Refactoring

200 papers

In this paper, we present a tertiary systematic literature review of previous surveys, secondary systematic literature reviews, and systematic mappings. We identify the main observations (what we know) and challenges (what we do not know)…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Guilherme Lacerda , Fabio Petrillo , Marcelo Pimenta , Yann Gael Gueheneuc

The ever-growing popularity of mobile phones has brought additional challenges to the software development lifecycle. Mobile applications (apps, for short) ought to provide the same set of features as conventional software, with limited…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-03-16 Luis Cruz , Rui Abreu

Context: Developers design test suites to automatically verify that software meets its expected behaviors. Many dynamic analysis techniques are performed on the exploitation of execution traces from test cases. However, in practice, there…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2015-06-08 Jifeng Xuan , Benoit Cornu , Matias Martinez , Benoit Baudry , Lionel Seinturier , Martin Monperrus

Refactoring is a software engineering practice that aims to improve code quality without altering program behavior. Although automated refactoring tools have been extensively studied, their practical applicability remains limited. Recent…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Alessandro Midolo , Emiliano Tramontana , Massimiliano Di Penta

Test smells can pose difficulties during testing activities, such as poor maintainability, non-deterministic behavior, and incomplete verification. Existing research has extensively addressed test smells in automated software tests but…

LLMs promise to transform unit test generation from a manual burden into an automated solution. Yet, beyond metrics such as compilability or coverage, little is known about the quality of LLM-generated tests, particularly their…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Wendkûuni C. Ouédraogo , Yinghua Li , Xueqi Dang , Xunzhu Tang , Anil Koyuncu , Jacques Klein , David Lo , Tegawendé F. Bissyandé

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…

This paper reports an empirical study on refactoring activity in three Java software systems. We investigated some questions on refactoring activity, to confirm or disagree on conclusions that have been drawn from previous empirical…

Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Anthony Peruma , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian D. Newman , Ali Ouni

Software testing is a crucial but time-consuming aspect of software development, and recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained popularity for automated test case generation. However, because LLMs are trained on vast amounts of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Benjamin Steenhoek , Michele Tufano , Neel Sundaresan , Alexey Svyatkovskiy

User Interfaces (UIs) intensively rely on event-driven programming: widgets send UI events, which capture users' interactions, to dedicated objects called controllers. Controllers use several UI listeners that handle these events to produce…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-05-29 Arnaud Blouin , Valéria Lelli , Benoit Baudry , Fabien Coulon

In today's world, the focus of programmers has shifted from writing complex, error-prone code to prioritizing simple, clear, efficient, and sustainable code that makes programs easier to understand. Code refactoring plays a critical role in…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Md. Raihan Tapader , Md. Mostafizer Rahman , Ariful Islam Shiplu , Md Faizul Ibne Amin , Yutaka Watanobe

To create unit tests, it may be necessary to refactor the production code, e.g. by widening access to specific methods or by decomposing classes into smaller units that are easier to test independently. We report on an extensive study to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Pavel Reich , Walid Maalej

Many software systems originate as prototypes or minimum viable products (MVPs), developed with an emphasis on delivery speed and responsiveness to changing requirements rather than long-term code maintainability. While effective for rapid…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Ema Smolic , Mario Brcic , Luka Hobor , Mihael Kovac

Architectural smells such as God Class, Cyclic Dependency, and Hub-like Dependency degrade software quality and maintainability. Existing tools detect such smells but rarely suggest how to fix them. This paper explores the use of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Samal Nursapa , Anastassiya Samuilova , Alessio Bucaioni , Phuong T. Nguyen

Developers often refactor code to improve the maintainability and comprehension of the software. There are many studies on refactoring activities in traditional software systems. However, refactoring in data-intensive systems is not well…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Biruk Asmare Muse , Foutse Khomh , Giuliano Antoniol

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

The concept of Self-Affirmed Refactoring (SAR) was introduced to explore how developers document their refactoring activities in commit messages, i.e., developers' explicit documentation of refactoring operations intentionally introduced…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Ali Ouni

Code refactoring is a fundamental software engineering practice aimed at improving code quality and maintainability. Despite its importance, developers often neglect refactoring due to the significant time, effort, and resources it…

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Saymon Souza , Amanda Santana , Eduardo Figueiredo , Igor Muzetti , João Eduardo Montandon , Lionel Briand