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Background In Software Engineering (SE), conference publications have high importance both in effective communication and in academic careers. Researchers actively discuss how a paper should be organized to be accepted in mainstream conferences. Aiming This work tackles the problem of generalizing and characterizing the type of papers accepted at SE conferences. Method The paper offers a new perspective in the analysis of SE literature: a categorization scheme for SE papers is obtained by merging, extending and revising related proposals from a few existing studies. The categorization scheme is used to classify the papers accepted at three top-tier SE conferences during five years (2012–2016). Results While a broader experience is certainly needed for validation and fine-tuning, preliminary outcomes can be observed relative to what problems and topics are addressed, what types of contributions are presented and how they are validated. Conclusions The results provide insights to paper writers, paper reviewers and conference organizers in focusing their future efforts, without any intent to provide judgments or authoritative guidelines.

Software reuse can improve productivity, but does not exempt developers from the need to test the reused code into the new context. For this purpose, we propose here specific approaches to white-box test prioritization, selection and minimization that take into account the reuse context when reordering or selecting test cases, by leveraging possible constraints delimiting the new input domain scope. Our scope-aided testing approach aims at detecting those faults that under such constraints would be more likely triggered in the new reuse context, and is proposed as a boost to existing approaches. Our empirical evaluation shows that in test suite prioritization we can improve the average rate of faults detected when considering faults that are in scope, while remaining competitive considering all faults; in test case selection and minimization we can considerably reduce the test suite size, with small to no extra impact on fault detection effectiveness considering both in-scope and all faults. Indeed, in minimization, we improve the in-scope fault detection effectiveness in all cases.

Test case generation is among the most labour-intensive tasks in software testing. It also has a strong impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of software testing. For these reasons, it has been one of the most active research topics in software testing for several decades, resulting in many different approaches and tools. This paper presents an orchestrated survey of the most prominent techniques for automatic generation of software test cases, reviewed in self-standing sections. The techniques presented include: (a) structural testing using symbolic execution, (b) model-based testing, (c) combinatorial testing, (d) random testing and its variant of adaptive random testing, and (e) search-based testing. Each section is contributed by world-renowned active researchers on the technique, and briefly covers the basic ideas underlying the method, the current state of the art, a discussion of the open research problems, and a perspective of the future development of the approach. As a whole, the paper aims at giving an introductory, up-to-date and (relatively) short overview of research in automatic test case generation, while ensuring a comprehensive and authoritative treatment.

Structural testing is based on the control flow of programs. In particular, branch testing requires that every branch in a program be exercised at least once; accordingly, a test path set must be selected from the potentially infinite executions paths. In this article, program structure is analyzed using a reduced graph representation, called ddgraph, which has been developed ad hoc. Two relationships (dominance and implication) between the edges of a ddgraph are introduced; these relationships make it possible to identify an edge subset, called unconstrained, with the property that, when the unconstrained edges are exercised, the traversal of all the other edges is guaranteed. Applying this property to program testing, we can state that a test path set that covers all unconstrained program branches will satisfy the branch coverage criterion.