Software metrics provide basic means to quantify quality of software systems. However, the effectiveness of the measurement process is directly dependent on the definition of reliable thresholds. If thresholds are not properly defined, it is difficult ...

Domain specific languages (DSLs) are widely used in practice and investigated in software engineering research. But so far, language workbenches do not provide sufficient built-in decision support for language design and improvement. Controlled ...

In the context of an industry-academia collaboration in the scope of test process improvement, there was a need to assess the usage, usefulness and quality of defect reports. The objective was to assess the extent to which each field of a defect report (...

Predicting the resolution times of issue reports in software development is important, because it helps allocate resources adequately. However, issue resolution time (IRT) prediction is difficult and prediction quality is limited. A common approach in ...

Category Partition (CP) is a black box testing technique that formalizes the specification of the input domain in a CP specification for the system under test. A CP specification is driven by tester's expertise and bundles parameters, categories (...

Background. Practical use of a measure X for an internal attribute (e.g., size, structural complexity, cohesion, coupling) of a software module often requires setting a threshold on X, to make decisions as to which software modules may be estimated to ...

The Software Assurance Metrics and Tool Evaluation (SAMATE) project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has created the Software Assurance Reference Dataset (SARD) to provide researchers and software security assurance tool ...

Mutation testing is a standard technique to evaluate the quality of a test suite. Due to its computationally intensive nature, many approaches have been proposed to make this technique feasible in real case scenarios. Among these approaches, uniform ...

Background: Bug fixing is a long-term and time-consuming activity. A software bug experiences a typical life cycle from newly reported to finally closed by developers, but it could be reopened afterwards for further actions due to reasons such as ...

Bad smells are symptoms that something may be wrong in the system design or code. There are many bad smells defined in the literature and detecting them is far from trivial. Therefore, several tools have been proposed to automate bad smell detection ...

Background: Software defect prediction has been an active area of research for the last few decades. Many models have been developed with aim to find locations in code likely to contain defects. As of yet, these prediction models are of limited use and ...