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As software engineering researchers, we are also zealous tool smiths. Building a research prototype is often a daunting task, let alone building an industry-grade family of tools supporting multiple platforms to ensure the generalizability of results. In this paper, we give advice to academic and industrial tool smiths on how to design and build an easy-to-maintain architecture capable of supporting...
The peer review process is central to the scientific method, the advancement and spread of research, as well as crucial for individual careers. However, the single-blind review mode currently used in most Software Engineering (SE) venues is susceptible to apparent and hidden biases, since reviewers know the identity of authors. We perform a study on the benefits and costs that are associated with...
Continuous Integration (CI) has become a best practice of modern software development. Yet, at present, we have a shortfall of insight into the testing practices that are common in CI-based software development. In particular, we seek quantifiable evidence on how central testing is to the CI process, how strongly the project language influences testing, whether different integration environments are...
Continuous Integration (CI) has become a best practice of modern software development. Thanks in part to its tight integration with GitHub, Travis CI has emerged as arguably the most widely used CI platform for Open-Source Software (OSS) development. However, despite its prominent role in Software Engineering in practice, the benefits, costs, and implications of doing CI are all but clear from an...
Automated test generation tools have been widely investigated with the goal of reducing the cost of testing activities. However, generated tests have been shownnot to help developers in detecting and finding more bugs even though they reach higher structural coverage compared to manual testing. The main reason is that generated tests are difficult to understand and maintain. Our paper proposes an...
Automated Static Analysis Tools (ASATs) are an integral part of today's software quality assurance practices. At present, a plethora of ASATs exist, each with different strengths. However, there is little guidance for developers on which of these ASATs to choose and combine for a project. As a result, many projects still only employ one ASAT with practically no customization. With UAV, the Unified...
Micro-clones are tiny duplicated pieces of code; they typically comprise only few statements or lines. In this paper, we study the “Last Line Effect,” the phenomenon that the last line or statement in a micro-clone is much more likely to contain an error than the previous lines or statements. We do this by analyzing 219 open source projects and reporting on 263 faulty micro-clones and interviewing...
Continuous Delivery is an agile software development practice in which developers frequently integrate changes into the main development line and produce releases of their software. An automated Continuous Integration infrastructure builds and tests these changes. Claimed advantages of CD include early discovery of (integration) errors, reduced cycle time, and better adoption of coding standards and...
The use of automatic static analysis has been a software engineering best practice for decades. However, we still do not know a lot about its use in real-world software projects: How prevalent is the use of Automated Static Analysis Tools (ASATs) such as FindBugs and JSHint? How do developers use these tools, and how does their use evolve over time? We research these questions in two studies on nine...
What do we know about software testing in the real world? It seems we know from Fred Brooks' seminal work "The Mythical Man-Month" that 50% of project effort is spent on testing. However, due to the enormous advances in software engineering in the past 40 years, the question stands: Is this observation still true? In fact, was it ever true? The vision for our research is to settle the discussion...
Micro-clones are tiny duplicated pieces of code, they typically comprise only a few statements or lines. In this paper, we expose the "last line effect," the phenomenon that the last line or statement in a micro-clone is much more likely to contain an error than the previous lines or statements. We do this by analyzing 208 open source projects and reporting on 202 faulty micro-clones.
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