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ICSE 2023
Sun 14 - Sat 20 May 2023 Melbourne, Australia
Thu 18 May 2023 15:00 - 15:07 at Meeting Room 110 - Test quality and improvement Chair(s): Guowei Yang

One of the main challenges that developers face when testing their systems lies in engineering test cases that are good enough to reveal bugs. And while our body of knowledge on software testing and automated test case generation is already quite significant, in practice, developers are still the ones responsible for engineering test cases manually. Therefore, understanding the developers’ thought- and decision-making processes while engineering test cases is a fundamental step in making developers better at testing software. In this paper, we observe 13 developers thinking-aloud while testing different real-world open-source methods, and use these observations to explain how developers engineer test cases. We then challenge and augment our main findings by surveying 72 software developers on their testing practices. We discuss our results from three different angles. First, we propose a general framework that explains how developers reason about testing. Second, we propose and describe in detail the three different overarching strategies that developers apply when testing. Third, we compare and relate our observations with the existing body of knowledge and propose future studies that would advance our knowledge on the topic.

Thu 18 May

Displayed time zone: Hobart change

13:45 - 15:15
Test quality and improvementTechnical Track / Journal-First Papers / DEMO - Demonstrations at Meeting Room 110
Chair(s): Guowei Yang University of Queensland
13:45
15m
Talk
Test Selection for Unified Regression Testing
Technical Track
Shuai Wang University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Xinyu Lian University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Darko Marinov University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Tianyin Xu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Pre-print
14:00
15m
Talk
ATM: Black-box Test Case Minimization based on Test Code Similarity and Evolutionary Search
Technical Track
Rongqi Pan University of Ottawa, Taher A Ghaleb University of Ottawa, Lionel Briand University of Luxembourg; University of Ottawa
14:15
15m
Talk
Measuring and Mitigating Gaps in Structural Testing
Technical Track
Soneya Binta Hossain University of Virginia, Matthew B Dwyer University of Virginia, Sebastian Elbaum University of Virginia, Anh Nguyen-Tuong University of Virginia
Pre-print
14:30
7m
Talk
FlaPy: Mining Flaky Python Tests at Scale
DEMO - Demonstrations
Martin Gruber BMW Group, University of Passau, Gordon Fraser University of Passau
Pre-print
14:37
7m
Talk
Scalable and Accurate Test Case Prioritization in Continuous Integration Contexts
Journal-First Papers
Ahmadreza Saboor Yaraghi University of Ottawa, Mojtaba Bagherzadeh University of Ottawa, Nafiseh Kahani University of Carlton, Lionel Briand University of Luxembourg; University of Ottawa
14:45
7m
Talk
Flakify: A Black-Box, Language Model-based Predictor for Flaky Tests
Journal-First Papers
Sakina Fatima University of Ottawa, Taher A Ghaleb University of Ottawa, Lionel Briand University of Luxembourg; University of Ottawa
14:52
7m
Talk
Developer-centric test amplification
Journal-First Papers
Carolin Brandt Delft University of Technology, Andy Zaidman Delft University of Technology
Pre-print
15:00
7m
Talk
How Developers Engineer Test Cases: An Observational Study
Journal-First Papers
Maurício Aniche Delft University of Technology, Christoph Treude University of Melbourne, Andy Zaidman Delft University of Technology
Pre-print