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Related papers: Test smells in LLM-Generated Unit Tests

200 papers

Background: Software systems powered by large language models are becoming a routine part of everyday technologies, supporting applications across a wide range of domains. In software engineering, many studies have focused on how LLMs…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Cleyton Magalhaes , Italo Santos , Brody Stuart-Verner , Ronnie de Souza Santos

Large language model (LLM)-based test generation has gained attention in software engineering, yet most studies evaluate LLMs' ability to generate unit tests in a single attempt for a given language, missing the opportunity to leverage LLM…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Djamel Eddine Khelladi , Charly Reux , Mathieu Acher

Unit testing is essential for ensuring software reliability and correctness. Classic Search-Based Software Testing (SBST) methods and concolic execution-based approaches for generating unit tests often fail to achieve high coverage due to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Bei Chu , Yang Feng , Kui Liu , Hange Shi , Zifan Nan , Zhaoqiang Guo , Baowen Xu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown tremendous promise in automated software engineering. In this paper, we investigate the opportunities of LLMs for automatic regression test generation for programs that take highly structured,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Jing Liu , Seongmin Lee , Eleonora Losiouk , Marcel Böhme

The latest paradigm shift in software development brings in the innovation and automation afforded by Large Language Models (LLMs), showcased by Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), which has shown remarkable capacity to generate code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Xiaoyin Wang , Dakai Zhu

Unit testing is crucial for software development and maintenance. Effective unit testing ensures and improves software quality, but writing unit tests is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Recent studies have proposed deep learning (DL)…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Junwei Zhang , Xing Hu , Shan Gao , Xin Xia , David Lo , Shanping Li

Context. The adoption of Machine Learning (ML)--enabled systems is steadily increasing. Nevertheless, there is a shortage of ML-specific quality assurance approaches, possibly because of the limited knowledge of how quality-related concerns…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Gilberto Recupito , Giammaria Giordano , Filomena Ferrucci , Dario Di Nucci , Fabio Palomba

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

To ensure the quality of a software system, developers perform an activity known as unit testing, where they write code (known as test cases) that verifies the individual software units that make up the system. Like production code, test…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Wajdi Aljedaani , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Anthony Peruma , Stephanie Ludi

Evaluating software engineering capabilities has become a core component of modern large language models (LLMs); however, the key bottleneck hindering further scaling lies not in the scarcity of high-quality solutions, but in the lack of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Yuxuan Sun , Yuze Zhao , Yufeng Wang , Yao Du , Zhiyuan Ma , Jinbo Wang , Mengdi Zhang , Kai Zhang , Zhenya Huang

While a substantial body of prior research has investigated the form and nature of production code, comparatively little attention has examined characteristics of test code, and, in particular, test smells in that code. In this paper, we…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Amjed Tahir , Steve Counsell , Stephen G. MacDonell

\textit{Background:} The use of large language models in software testing is growing fast as they support numerous tasks, from test case generation to automation, and documentation. However, their adoption often relies on informal…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Maria Deolinda Santana , Cleyton Magalhaes , Ronnie de Souza Santos

Automated test techniques usually generate unit tests with higher code coverage than manual tests. However, the readability of automated tests is crucial for code comprehension and maintenance. The readability of unit tests involves many…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Zhichao Zhou , Yutian Tang , Yun Lin , Jingzhu He

Large Language Models (LLMs) are one of the most promising developments in the field of artificial intelligence, and the software engineering community has readily noticed their potential role in the software development life-cycle.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Greta Dolcetti , Vincenzo Arceri , Eleonora Iotti , Sergio Maffeis , Agostino Cortesi , Enea Zaffanella

Generating unit tests is a crucial task in software development, demanding substantial time and effort from programmers. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) introduces a novel avenue for unit test script generation. This research…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Shreya Bhatia , Tarushi Gandhi , Dhruv Kumar , Pankaj Jalote

Automated unit test generation using large language models (LLMs) holds great promise but often struggles with generating tests that are both correct and maintainable in real-world projects. This paper presents KTester, a novel framework…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Anji Li , Mingwei Liu , Zhenxi Chen , Zheng Pei , Zike Li , Dekun Dai , Yanlin Wang , Zibin Zheng

Automated test generation is essential for software quality assurance, with coverage rate serving as a key metric to ensure thorough testing. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in improving test…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-26 WeiZhe Xu , Mengyu Liu , Fanxin Kong

Automated unit test generation aims to improve software quality while reducing the time and effort required for creating tests manually. However, existing techniques primarily generate regression oracles that predicate on the implemented…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Adam Bodicoat , Gunel Jahangirova , Valerio Terragni

Unit testing is an essential component of the software development life-cycle. A developer could easily and quickly catch and fix software faults introduced in the source code by creating and running unit tests. Despite their importance,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-08-02 Denivan Campos , Larissa Rocha , Ivan Machado

Many automated test generation techniques have been developed to aid developers with writing tests. To facilitate full automation, most existing techniques aim to either increase coverage, or generate exploratory inputs. However, existing…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-07-26 Sungmin Kang , Juyeon Yoon , Shin Yoo