technical-news

Peter Spragins, Google Software Engineer and Teaching Assistant at UCSD Math Department, is summarizing almost four years of experience in running software tests at scale, with several colleagues in Mountain View (California).
"The two key numbers for the system's performance are sensitivity, the percentage of failing tests we actually execute, and specificity, the percentage of passing tests we actually skip. The two numbers go hand in hand."
Discover how Machine Learning is now part of the Google process of committing code. Read his article about Efficacy Presubmit Service

A collaboration between KTH, Saab and Ericsson, the CASTOR Software Research Center was inaugurated today at Östermalm (Sweden), with over 50 guests including KTH professors, researchers, industry representatives and employees from the French embassy and Vinnova. 

Prof. Benoit Baudry underlined the aim of delivering outstanding research in software engineering and also expressed his wishes to increase collaboration through more co-developments of open source software tools. The goal is also to increase the number of industry PhD students to run the core research activities of the center, and contributing to reducing the cultural gap that currently exists when referring to software technology between the industry and the lab.

Ingemar Söderquist (Saab) and Diarmuid Corcoran (Ericsson) shared their vision about the challenges and opportunities for software technology in their respective application areas (defense and telecom).

Robert Feldt, Professor of Software Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, talked about his experience for setting up collaborations with the industry on software research in Sweden. 

Kristina Höök, Professor in Interaction Design at KTH, presented her insights after having led for more than 10 years the “Mobile Life” research center at KTH.

The official opening was made by Pontus de Laval – CTO SAAB, Dr. Magnus Frodigh – Acting Head of Research at Ericsson, and Prof. Annika Trigell – KTH Vice-President for research, which followed by a reception dinner.

Check out the Castor Research Center inauguration presentations and photos 

Automatically detecting flaky tests, DeFlaker provides a new milestone in order to cope with them in a principled way.
There is no need to re-run the failed tests anymore. 

In the STAMP project, we follow a similar philosophy: we target major testing problems (missing assertions, crash reproduction) and we invent principled tools that target those problems and that are evaluated on large and complex software projects. These projects are both coming from the STAMP project partners and from international open source members from the OW2 community.

Place: Montpellier Corum Conference Center
Conference: ASE 2018
Instructors: Benoît Baudry (KTH), Vincent Massol (XWiki), Oscar Luis Vera Pérez (INRIA)

Let the CI spot the holes in tested code with Descartes tool

In this tutorial, we introduce the intriguing concept of pseudo-tested method, i.e. methods that are covered by the test suite, yet no test case fails when the method body is removed. We show that such methods can be found in mature, well-tested projects and we discuss some possible root causes. Attendants have the opportunity to experiment hands-on with our tool, called Descartes tool, which automatically detects pseudo-tested methods in Java projects.

Trying to generate custom XWiki WARs directly from the unit tests, Vincent Massol, XWiki CTO, gave a try to the the SkrinkWrap Resolver.
Follow his work on this article about Resolving Maven Artifacts with ShrinkWrap... or Not 

As part of the STAMP Project, Vincent Massol, XWiki CTO, is conducting five testing experimentations, with issues and limitations.
Read more insights in his article about Environment Testing Experimentations  

DSpot is a mutation testing tool that automatically generates new tests from existing test suites. It's being developed as part of the STAMP European research project to which XWiki SAS is participating to.
Read this article from Vincent Massol, CTO of Wiki about DSpot Automatic Test Generation

How to verify the quality of your tests?
Vincent Massol, XWiki CTO, suggests a strategy for Test Quality Control

Flaky tests are a plague because they lower the credibility in your CI strategy, by sending false positive notification emails.

Vincent Massol, XWiki Technical Director suggests a new Flaky test strategy.

• Learn more about Flaky tests handling with Jenkins and JIRA in a blog post by Vincent Massol.

Conference: SoftShake 2017, Geneva

Offered at SoftShake 2017 in Geneva, by Vincent Massol, Technical Director of XWiki SAS, this brand new presentation explains how to use XWiki to create a custom Quality Dashboard by aggregating metrics from other sites (Jenkins, SonarQube, JIRA and GitHub), saving them locally to draw history graphs and sending emails when combined metric thresholds are crossed.