Publicaties

Software start-ups have gained attention from the software engineering research community in the recent past. However, the systematic adoption of existing engineering practices for use in start-ups has not attracted that much attention. The smooth transitioning towards software product lines in particular can be a major stumbling block for start-ups that must broaden their product portfolio to deal with divergent demands imposed by the market ...

Recent research has shown that clones occur far more often in test code than in production code. This is explained by the typical template of unit test code (the setup-stimulate-verify-teardown cycle), a template which lends itself well to parameterisation of proven solutions. However, little is known on how these clones evolve over time. In this paper, we compare the evolution of clones in test code with those in production code. Based on a ...

Software testing enables development teams to maintain the quality of a software system while it evolves. The database manipulation code requires special attention in this context. However, it is often neglected and suffers from software maintenance problems. In this paper, we study the current state-of-the-practice in testing database manipulation code. We first analysed the tests of 72 open-source projects to gain insight into the coverage of ...

Mutation testing is the state-of-the-art technique to evaluate the fault-detection capabilities of a test suite, but its adoption has been limited. In this paper, we aim to investigate where mutation testing fits within the existing test strategies, whether the mutation analysis can be done in a timely manner, and which pain points remain to be tackled for industrial integration. For this, we performed open format interviews with two companies ...

F-ASTMut is an open-source mutation testing research tool for the C language family based on manipulation of the abstract syntax tree. The tool is designed for detailed measurements, analysis, and tuning of optimisation techniques. The goal of F-ASTMut is to analyse the speedups of optimisation techniques to ultimately enable mutation testing in industrial settings. Currently, F-ASTMut features four optimisation techniques; an exclusion scheme ...

The growing reliance on automated software tests raises a fundamental question: How trustworthy are these automated tests? Today, mutation testing is acknowledged within academic circles as the most promising technique for assessing the fault-detection capability of a test suite. The technique deliberately injects faults (called mutants) into the production code and counts how many of them are caught by the test suite. Mutation testing shines in ...

The environmental conditions in a conservation-restoration studio for paintings induce an inherent risk to objects of art and to humans working on those objects. They are both subject to (sometimes dangerous) chemical substances and fluctuations in environmental conditions (e.g., temperature, relative humidity). In this paper, we report on a measuring campaign which lasted more than a year collecting data about the air quality within a painting ...

Autonomous Guided Vehicles are mobile robots that can use various technologies and techniques for their navigation such as line following, indoor localisation, image recognition, GPS, laser- and gyro-based. These mobile robots are widely used in the manufacturing industry to achieve goals around their operation area. In this research, we benefit from the ultra-wide-band (UWB) technology to enhance the navigation of the mobile robot's indoor area ...

Software test amplification is the act of strengthening manually written test-cases to exercise the boundary conditions of the system under test. It has been demonstrated by the research community to work for the programming language Java, relying on the static type system to safely transform the code under test. In dynamically typed languages, such type declarations are not available, and as a consequence test amplification has yet to find its ...

Solidity is the dominant programming language for specifying smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain platform. Smart contracts permit the exchange of cryptocurrency, and hence are vulnerable to security attacks, most notably reentrancy exploits. Extensions to the solidity language, therefore, provide safer alternatives via special-purpose syntactic constructs. Based on an analysis of 26,799 contracts actually deployed on the Ethereum ...