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Regression testing provides important pass or fail signals that developers use to make decisions after code changes. However, flaky tests, which pass or fail even when the code has not changed, can mislead developers. A common kind of flaky tests are order-dependent tests, which pass or fail depending on the order in which the tests are run. Fixing order-dependent tests is often tedious and time-consuming. We propose iFixFlakies, a framework for automatically fixing order-dependent tests. The key insight in iFixFlakies is that test suites often already have tests, which we call helpers, whose logic resets or sets the states for order-dependent tests to pass. iFixFlakies searches a test suite for helpers that make the order-dependent tests pass and then recommends patches for the order-dependent tests using code from these helpers. Our evaluation on 110 truly orderdependent tests from a public dataset shows that 58 of them have helpers, and iFixFlakies can fix all 58. We opened pull requests for 56 order-dependent tests (2 of 58 were already fixed), and developers have already accepted pull requests for 21 of them, with all the remaining ones still pending. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging.

Blockchain platforms are coming into use for processing critical transactions among participants who have not established mutual trust. Many blockchains are programmable, supporting smart contracts, which maintain persistent state and support transactions that transform the state. Unfortunately, bugs in many smart contracts have been exploited by hackers. Obsidian is a novel programming language with a type system that enables static detection of bugs that are common in smart contracts today. Obsidian is based on a core calculus, Silica, for which we proved type soundness. Obsidian uses typestate to detect improper state manipulation and uses linear types to detect abuse of assets. We integrated a permissions system that encodes a notion of ownership to allow for safe, flexible aliasing. We describe two case studies that evaluate Obsidian's applicability to the domains of parametric insurance and supply chain management, finding that Obsidian's type system facilitates reasoning about high-level states and ownership of resources. We compared our Obsidian implementation to a Solidity implementation, observing that the Solidity implementation requires much boilerplate checking and tracking of state, whereas Obsidian does this work statically.

Developers typically rely on regression testing techniques to ensure that their changes do not break existing functionality. Unfortunately, these techniques suffer from flaky tests, which can both pass and fail when run multiple times on the same version of code and tests. One prominent type of flaky tests is order-dependent (OD) tests, which are tests that pass when run in one order but fail when run in another order. Although OD tests may cause flaky-test failures, OD tests can help developers run their tests faster by allowing them to share resources. We propose to make regression testing techniques dependent-test-aware to reduce flaky-test failures. To understand the necessity of dependent-test-aware regression testing techniques, we conduct the first study on the impact of OD tests on three regression testing techniques: test prioritization, test selection, and test parallelization. In particular, we implement 4 test prioritization, 6 test selection, and 2 test parallelization algorithms, and we evaluate them on 11 Java modules with OD tests. When we run the orders produced by the traditional, dependent-test-unaware regression testing algorithms, 82% of human-written test suites and 100% of automatically-generated test suites with OD tests have at least one flaky-test failure. We develop a general approach for enhancing regression testing algorithms to make them dependent-test-aware, and apply our approach to 12 algorithms. Compared to traditional, unenhanced regression testing algorithms, the enhanced algorithms use provided test dependencies to produce orders with different permutations or extra tests. Our evaluation shows that, in comparison to the orders produced by unenhanced algorithms, the orders produced by enhanced algorithms (1) have overall 80% fewer flaky-test failures due to OD tests, and (2) may add extra tests but run only 1% slower on average. Our results suggest that enhancing regression testing algorithms to be dependent-test-aware can substantially reduce flaky-test failures with only a minor slowdown to run the tests.

We show that the first-order theory of Sturmian words over Presburger arithmetic is decidable. Using a general adder recognizing addition in Ostrowski numeration systems by Baranwal, Schaeffer and Shallit, we prove that the first-order expansions of Presburger arithmetic by a single Sturmian word are uniformly ω-automatic, and then deduce the decidability of the theory of the class of such structures. Using an implementation of this decision algorithm called Pecan, we automatically reprove many classical theorems about Sturmian words in seconds, and are able to obtain new results about antisquares and antipalindromes in characteristic Sturmian words. This is a preprint version. Later versions might contain significant changes.