Software Quality Journal

Software maintenance is becoming more challenging with the increased complexity of the software and the frequently applied changes. Performing impact analysis before the actual implementation of a change is a crucial task during system maintenance. ...

Past and recent studies have shown that design smells which are poor solutions to recurrent design problems make object-oriented systems difficult to maintain, and that they negatively impact the class change- and fault-proneness. More recently, lexical ...

Embedded software engineering very often involves development of complex, mission critical software; wherein it is imperative that the developed software fulfills its requirements to achieve high quality. In such cases, there are several advantages of ...

Testing software products is very expensive and time consuming, especially for large software systems with extensive regression testing. During regression testing, a modified system is often re-tested using an existing test suite. Since test suites can ...

The advent of ubiquitous systems places even more focus on users, since these systems must support their daily activities in such a transparent way that does not disturb them. Thus, much more attention should be provided to human---computer interaction (...

Developments in the automation of test data generation have greatly improved efficiency of the software testing process, but the so-called oracle problem (deciding the pass or fail outcome of a test execution) is still primarily an expensive and error-...

One of the grand challenges for adequately testing complex software is due to the oracle problem. Metamorphic Testing (MT) is a promising technique to alleviate the oracle problem through using one or multiple Metamorphic Relations (MRs) as test ...

Though mutation analysis is the primary means of evaluating the quality of test suites, it suffers from inadequate standardization. Mutation analysis tools vary based on language, when mutants are generated (phase of compilation), and target audience. ...

In software engineering, impact analysis involves predicting the software elements (e.g., modules, classes, methods) potentially impacted by a change in the source code. Impact analysis is required to optimize the testing effort. In this paper, we ...

Software testability represents the degree of ease with which a software artifact supports testing. When it is easy to detect defects in a program through testing, the program has high testability; otherwise, the testability of the program is low. As an ...

Model-based testing relies on models of the system under test to automatically generate test cases. Consequently, the effectiveness of the generated test cases depends on models. In general, these models are created manually, and as such, they are ...

Modern web applications are characterized by ultra-rapid development cycles, and web testers tend to pay scant attention to the quality of their automated end-to-end test suites. Indeed, these quickly become hard to maintain, as the application under ...

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are ubiquitous systems that integrate digital technologies with physical processes. These systems are becoming configurable to respond to the different needs that users demand. As a consequence, their variability is ...