Exploring Tools and Strategies Used During Regular Expression Composition Tasks

Bai, Gina R.; Clee, Brian; Shrestha, Nischal; Chapman, Carl; Wright, Cimone; Stolee, Kathryn T.

doi:10.1109/icpc.2019.00039

Cited by 13 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Researchers and educators often measure the accuracy of student-authored source code via the number of passed test cases/suites [26]- [28] while students' productivity is often evaluated using the number of lines of code (LOC) changed per hour [29] or per work session [26]. Pettit et al [30] investigated how students modify their programs given automated assessment tools, using more than 45,000 CS1 student submissions collected over seven semesters.…”

Section: B Students' Programming and Testing Activitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Assertion Roulette still a test smell? An experiment from the perspective of testing education

Bai

Presler-Marshall

Fisk

et al. 2022

2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

Self Cite

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Test smells are commonly perceived as having a negative impact on software maintainability and correctness. Research has shown that Assertion Roulette is the most pervasive smell in industrial and open-source systems. However, some recent studies argue that the impact of Assertion Roulette is not as severe as previously believed, and developers usually consider it acceptable.The controversy over the impact of Assertion Roulette also exists in the area of testing education. To assess the impact of Assertion Roulette, we conducted a controlled empirical study with 42 CS students. We recruited participants from two populations, CS1 and a graduate testing course, to see what role experience may have in terms of this test smell's impact. Participants were tasked with implementing a project in Java that passes provided JUnit tests. Through analysis of student-authored source code, we measured the impact of Assertion Roulette using code quality measures and testing behavior measures. Our findings show that the impact of Assertion Roulette on students in this study was minimal. Though students with exposure to the test smell began testing significantly later, they performed similarly in terms of programming quality measures. Thus, it would seem the Assertion Roulette smell is no longer a smell at all, even for less experienced populations like students.

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Section: B Students' Programming and Testing Activitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Assertion Roulette still a test smell? An experiment from the perspective of testing education

Bai

Presler-Marshall

Fisk

et al. 2022

2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Regex comprehension has been studied using controlled experiments [6] and composition strategies have been studied using observational studies of developers [2]. This work is complementary to work in regex comprehension, as regex representation code smells were found in this work.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 87%

Demystifying Regular Expression Bugs: A comprehensive study on regular expression bug causes, fixes, and testing

Wang,

Brown,

Jennings

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Regular expressions cause string-related bugs and open security vulnerabilities for DOS attacks. However, beyond ReDoS (Regular expression Denial of Service), little is known about the extent to which regular expression issues affect software development and how these issues are addressed in practice. We conduct an empirical study of 356 merged regex-related pull request bugs from Apache, Mozilla, Facebook, and Google GitHub repositories. We identify and classify the nature of the regular expression problems, the fixes, and the related changes in the test code.The most important findings in this paper are as follows: 1) incorrect regular expression behavior is the dominant root cause of regular expression bugs (165/356, 46.3%). The remaining root causes are incorrect API usage (9.3%) and other code issues that require regular expression changes in the fix (29.5%), 2) fixing regular expression bugs is nontrivial as it takes more time and more lines of code to fix them compared to the general pull requests, 3) most (51%) of the regex-related pull requests do not contain test code changes. Certain regex bug types (e.g., compile error, performance issues, regex representation) are less likely to include test code changes than others, and 4) the dominant type of test code changes in regex-related pull requests is test case addition (75%). The results of this study contribute to a broader understanding of the practical problems faced by developers when using, fixing, and testing regular expressions.

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“…Regex comprehension has been studied using controlled experiments (Chapman et al 2017) and composition strategies have been studied using observational studies of developers (Bai et al 2019). This work is complementary to work in regex comprehension, as regex representation code smells were found in this work.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 89%

Demystifying regular expression bugs

Wang¹,

Brown

Jennings

et al. 2021

Empir Software Eng

Self Cite

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Regular expressions cause string-related bugs and open security vulnerabilities for DOS attacks. However, beyond ReDoS (Regular expression Denial of Service), little is known about the extent to which regular expression issues affect software development and how these issues are addressed in practice. We conduct an empirical study of 356 regex-related bugs from merged pull requests in Apache, Mozilla, Facebook, and Google GitHub repositories. We identify and classify the nature of the regular expression problems, the fixes, and the related changes in the test code. The most important findings in this paper are as follows: 1) incorrect regular expression semantics is the dominant root cause of regular expression bugs (165/356, 46.3%). The remaining root causes are incorrect API usage (9.3%) and other code issues that require regular expression changes in the fix (29.5%), 2) fixing regular expression bugs is nontrivial as it takes more time and more lines of code to fix them compared to the general pull requests, 3) most (51%) of the regex-related pull requests do not contain test code changes. Certain regex bug types (e.g., compile error, performance issues, regex representation) are less likely to include test code changes than others, and 4) the dominant type of test code changes in regex-related pull requests is test case addition (75%). The results of this study contribute to a broader understanding of the practical problems faced by developers when using, fixing, and testing regular expressions. Keywords Regular expression bug characteristics• Pull requests • Bug fixes • Test code

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Exploring Tools and Strategies Used During Regular Expression Composition Tasks

Cited by 13 publications

References 38 publications

Is Assertion Roulette still a test smell? An experiment from the perspective of testing education

Is Assertion Roulette still a test smell? An experiment from the perspective of testing education

Demystifying Regular Expression Bugs: A comprehensive study on regular expression bug causes, fixes, and testing

Demystifying regular expression bugs

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