English
Related papers

Related papers: Understanding and Characterizing Mock Assertions i…

200 papers

The use of asserts in code has received increasing attention in the software engineering community in the past few years, even though it has been a recognized programming construct for many decades. A previous empirical study by Casalnuovo…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Steve Counsell , Tracy Hall , Thomas Shippey , David Bowes , Amjed Tahir , Stephen MacDonell

Unit tests often lack concise summaries that convey test intent, especially in auto-generated or poorly documented codebases. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising solution, but their effectiveness depends heavily on how they are…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Anamul Haque Mollah , Ahmed Aljohani , Hyunsook Do

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for automated test generation, yet most approaches to generating Java unit tests still rely on mocking frameworks to handle dependencies. Mockless test generation could exercise more…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Qinghua Xu , Guancheng Wang , Lionel Briand , Zhaoqiang Guo , Kui Liu

The continuous growth of quantum computing and the increasingly complex quantum programs resulting from it lead to unprecedented obstacles in ensuring program correctness. Runtime assertions are, therefore, becoming a crucial tool in the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-05-08 Damian Rovara , Lukas Burgholzer , Robert Wille

Assertion messages significantly enhance unit tests by clearly explaining the reasons behind test failures, yet they are frequently omitted by developers and automated test-generation tools. Despite recent advancements, Large Language…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Ahmed Aljohani , Anamul Haque Mollah , Hyunsook Do

Implementing automated unit tests is an important but time-consuming activity in software development. To assist developers in this task, many techniques for automating unit test generation have been developed. However, despite this effort,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Rangeet Pan , Myeongsoo Kim , Rahul Krishna , Raju Pavuluri , Saurabh Sinha

Safety and mission performance validation of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is a major challenge. In this paper we describe a methodology for constructing and applying assertion checks to validate the behaviour of an AV operating either in…

Databases · Computer Science 2022-05-16 Christopher Harper , Greg Chance , Abanoub Ghobrial , Saquib Alam , Tony Pipe , Kerstin Eder

Software testing is an essential part of the software lifecycle and requires a substantial amount of time and effort. It has been estimated that software developers spend close to 50% of their time on testing the code they write. For these…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-02-20 Cody Watson , Michele Tufano , Kevin Moran , Gabriele Bavota , Denys Poshyvanyk

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Baoquan Cui , Rong Qu , Jian Zhang

Specification inference techniques aim at (automatically) inferring a set of assertions that capture the exhibited software behaviour by generating and filtering assertions through dynamic test executions and mutation testing. Although…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Aayush Garg , Renzo Degiovanni , Facundo Molina , Mike Papadakis , Nazareno Aguirre , Maxime Cordy , Yves Le Traon

Unit tests are widely used to check source code quality, but they can be too coarse-grained or ill-suited for testing individual program statements. We introduce inline tests to make it easier to check for faults in statements. We motivate…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-09-15 Yu Liu , Pengyu Nie , Owolabi Legunsen , Milos Gligoric

The exploit or the Proof of Concept of the vulnerability plays an important role in developing superior vulnerability repair techniques, as it can be used as an oracle to verify the correctness of the patches generated by the tools.…

Unit testing represents the foundational basis of the software testing pyramid, beneath integration and end-to-end testing. Automated software testing researchers have proposed a variety of techniques to assist developers in this…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Michele Tufano , Dawn Drain , Alexey Svyatkovskiy , Neel Sundaresan

Developers are increasingly using services such as Dependabot to automate dependency updates. However, recent research has shown that developers perceive such services as unreliable, as they heavily rely on test coverage to detect conflicts…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Joseph Hejderup , Georgios Gousios

Functional verification increasingly relies on Assertion-Based Verification (ABV), which has become a key approach for verifying hardware designs due to its efficiency and effectiveness. Central to ABV are automatic assertion miners, which…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Mohammad Reza Heidari Iman , Giorgio Di Natale , Katell Morin-Allory

Unit testing is an essential component of software testing, with the assert statements playing an important role in determining whether the tested function operates as expected. Although research has explored automated test case generation,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-01 Han Wang , Han Hu , Chunyang Chen , Burak Turhan

The security of computer systems typically relies on a hardware root of trust. As vulnerabilities in hardware can have severe implications on a system, there is a need for techniques to support security verification activities.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Rahul Kande , Hammond Pearce , Benjamin Tan , Brendan Dolan-Gavitt , Shailja Thakur , Ramesh Karri , Jeyavijayan Rajendran

Estimating software testability can crucially assist software managers to optimize test budgets and software quality. In this paper, we propose a new approach that radically differs from the traditional approach of pursuing testability…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Luca Guglielmo , Leonardo Mariani , Giovanni Denaro

Memory safety defects pose a major threat to software reliability, enabling cyberattacks, outages, and crashes. To mitigate these risks, organizations adopt Compositional Bounded Model Checking (BMC), using unit proofs to formally verify…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Paschal C. Amusuo , Owen Cochell , Taylor Le Lievre , Parth V. Patil , Aravind Machiry , James C. Davis

Mutation testing is used to evaluate the effectiveness of test suites. In recent years, a promising variation called extreme mutation testing emerged that is computationally less expensive. It identifies methods where their functionality…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-04-15 Maik Betka , Stefan Wagner