Sustainable computing is a rapidly growing research area spanning several areas of computer science. In the software engineering field, the topic has received increasing attention in recent years, with several studies addressing a range of concerns. However, few studies have demonstrated the awareness of software practitioners about the underlying concepts of sustainability in the software development practice. In this effect, this study aims to provide some evidence regarding the practitioners’ perception about the adoption of sustainability in software development, under four main perspectives: economic, social, environmental, and technical. In previous work, we carried out a preliminary survey study with twenty-five software engineers who work in a range of domains. The yielded results indicate an overall lack of knowledge about the topic, in particular, related to concepts about sustainable software. In this study, we extend the survey and reached a number of ninety-seven respondents. The novel results confirmed the evidence raised in the original survey that sustainability in the context of software is a new subject for software practitioners. However, professionals have shown interest in it. There is a general understanding that sustainability should be treated as a quality attribute. Among the observed perspectives, we generated an initial theory, which shows that software practitioners know the subject around ‘Green in Software’, even unconsciously. This study contributes to the green and sustainable software engineering field by bringing evidence on comprehending how the software industry understands the adoption of sustainability in the software development process.
Several strategies have supported test quality measurement and analysis. For example, code coverage, a widely used one, enables verification of the test case to cover as many source code branches as possible. Another set of affordable strategies to evaluate the test code quality exists, such as test smells analysis. Test smells are poor design choices in test code implementation, and their occurrence might reduce the test suite quality. A practical and largescale test smells identification depends on automated tool support. Otherwise, test smells analysis could become a cost-ineffective strategy. In an earlier study, we proposed the JNose Test, automated tool support to detect test smells and analyze test suite quality from the test smells perspective. This study extends the previous one in two directions: i) we implemented the JNose-Core, an API encompassing the test smells detection rules. Through an extensible architecture, the tool is now capable of accomodating new detection rules or programming languages; and ii) we performed an empirical study to evaluate the JNose Test effectiveness and compare it against the state-of-the-art tool, the tsDetect. Results showed that the JNose-Core precision score ranges from 91% to 100%, and the recall score from 89% to 100%. It also presented a slight improvement in the test smells detection rules compared to the tsDetect for the test smells detection at the class level.
Developing test code may be a time-consuming process that requires much effort and cost, especially when done manually. In addition, during this process, developers and testers are likely to adopt bad design choices, which may lead to introducing the so-called test smells in the test code. As the test code with test smells size increases, these tests might become more complex, and as a consequence, much more challenging to understand and evolve them correctly. Therefore, test smells may harm the test code quality and maintenance and break the whole software testing activities. In this context, this study aims to understand whether software testing practitioners unintentionally insert test smells when they implement test code. We first carried out an expert survey to analyze the usage frequency of a set of test smells and then interviews to reach a deeper understanding of how practitioners deal with test smells. Sixty professionals participated in the survey, and fifty professionals participated in the interviews. The yielded results indicate that experienced professionals introduce test smells during their daily programming tasks, even when using their companies’ standardized practices. Additionally, tools support test development and quality improvement, but most interviewees are not aware of test smells’ concepts.
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