We are very happy to announce that our research group got two papers and a technical briefing accepted at ICSE 2016 in Austin, Texas.

The first accepted paper entitled “The Impact of Test Case Summaries on Bug Fixing Performance: An Empirical Investigation” was written in collaboration with the University of Delft. The authors of the paper are : Sebastiano Panichella, Annibale Panichella, Moritz Beller, Andy Zaidman and Harald Gall.

Abstract: “Automated test generation tools have been widely investigated with the goal of reducing the cost of testing activities. However, generated tests have been shown not 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 approach which automatically generates test case summaries of the portion of code exercised by each individual test, thereby improving understandability. We argue that this approach can complement the current techniques around automated unit test generation or search-based techniques designed to generate a possibly minimal set of test cases. In evaluating our approach we found that (1) developers find twice as many bugs, and (2) test case summaries significantly improve the comprehensibility of test cases, which is considered particularly useful by developers.”

A preprint of the paper can be found online.

The second paper is entitled “Using (Bio)Metrics to Predict Code Quality Online” and was written by Sebastian Müller and Thomas Fritz. The paper investigates the use of biometrics, such as heart rate variability (HRV) or electro-dermal activity (EDA) to determine the difficulty that developers experience while working on real world change tasks and automatically identify code quality concerns while a developer is making a change to the code.

A preprint of the paper will be available soon.

Additionally, we had a technical briefing on “Using Docker Containers to Improve Reproducibility in Software Engineering Research”, by Jürgen Cito and Harald Gall, accepted, where we will present opportunities to aid reproducibility to the SE community.