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Related papers: Test smells in LLM-Generated Unit Tests

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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

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated their adoption in software engineering contexts. However, concerns persist about the structural quality of the code they produce. In particular, LLMs often replicate poor…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Alejandro Velasco , Daniel Rodriguez-Cardenas , Dipin Khati , David N. Palacio , Luftar Rahman Alif , Denys Poshyvanyk

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

Unit tests play a key role in ensuring the correctness of software. However, manually creating unit tests is a laborious task, motivating the need for automation. Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been applied to this problem,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Max Schäfer , Sarah Nadi , Aryaz Eghbali , Frank Tip

Unit testing is an essential but resource-intensive step in software development, ensuring individual code units function correctly. This paper introduces AgoneTest, an automated evaluation framework for Large Language Model-generated (LLM)…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Andrea Lops , Fedelucio Narducci , Azzurra Ragone , Michelantonio Trizio , Claudio Bartolini

Unit testing is a fundamental practice in modern software engineering, with the aim of ensuring the correctness, maintainability, and reliability of individual software components. Very recently, with the advances in Large Language Models…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Quanjun Zhang , Chunrong Fang , Siqi Gu , Ye Shang , Zhenyu Chen , Liang Xiao

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 rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has strongly impacted software engineering, leading to a growing number of studies on automated unit test generation. However, the standalone use of LLMs without post-processing has proven…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Michael Konstantinou , Renzo Degiovanni , Mike Papadakis

Software testing is a crucial aspect of software development, and the creation of high-quality tests that adhere to best practices is essential for effective maintenance. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained popularity for…

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

The rapid integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into software engineering practice is reshaping how software testing activities are performed. LLMs are increasingly used to support software testing. Consequently, software testing…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Peng Yang , Yunfeng Zhu , Chao Chang , Shengcheng Yu , Zhenyu Chen , Yong Tang

Unit testing plays a pivotal role in software development, improving software quality and reliability. However, generating effective test cases manually is time-consuming, prompting interest in unit testing research. Recently, Large…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Ye Shang , Quanjun Zhang , Chunrong Fang , Siqi Gu , Jianyi Zhou , Zhenyu Chen

The design and implementation of unit tests is a complex task many programmers neglect. This research evaluates the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in automatically generating test cases, comparing them with manual tests. An…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Martín Rodríguez , Gustavo Rossi , Alejandro Fernandez

The usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) for software and test development has continued to increase since LLMs were first introduced, but only recently have the expectations of LLMs become more realistic. Verifying the correctness of code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Zachariah Sollenberger , Rahul Patel , Saieda Ali Zada , Sunita Chandrasekaran

Unit testing is an essential yet frequently arduous task. Various automated unit test generation tools have been introduced to mitigate this challenge. Notably, methods based on large language models (LLMs) have garnered considerable…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Yinghao Chen , Zehao Hu , Chen Zhi , Junxiao Han , Shuiguang Deng , Jianwei Yin

Unit testing plays a critical role in ensuring software correctness. However, writing unit tests manually is labor-intensive, especially for strongly typed languages like Java, motivating the need for automated approaches. Traditional…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Qinghua Xu , Guancheng Wang , Lionel Briand , Kui Liu

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…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant potential in automating software engineering tasks, particularly in code generation. However, current evaluation benchmarks, which primarily focus on accuracy, fall short in assessing the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Alejandro Velasco , Daniel Rodriguez-Cardenas , Luftar Rahman Alif , David N. Palacio , Denys Poshyvanyk

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

Automated unit test generation is critical for software quality but traditional structure-driven methods often lack the semantic understanding required to produce realistic inputs and oracles. Large language models (LLMs) address this…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Bei Chu , Yang Feng , Kui Liu , Zhaoqiang Guo , Yichi Zhang , Hange Shi , Zifan Nan , Baowen Xu