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We explore the concept of folklore within software engineering, drawing from folklore studies to define and characterize narratives, myths, rituals, humor, and informal knowledge that circulate within software development communities. Using a literature review and thematic analysis, we curated exemplar folklore items (e.g., beliefs about where defects occur, the 10x developer legend, and technical debt). We analyzed their narrative form, symbolic meaning, occupational relevance, and links to knowledge areas in software engineering. To ground these concepts in practice, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 industrial practitioners in Sweden to explore how such narratives are recognized or transmitted within their daily work and how they affect it. Synthesizing these results, we propose a working definition of software engineering folklore as informally transmitted, traditional, and emergent narratives and heuristics enacted within occupational folk groups that shape identity, values, and collective knowledge. We argue that making the concept of software engineering folklore explicit provides a foundation for subsequent ethnography and folklore studies and for reflective practice that can preserve context-effective heuristics while challenging unhelpful folklore. 

Biases are hard-wired behaviours that influence software testers. Understanding how these biases affect testers' everyday behaviour is crucial for developing practical software tools and strategies to help testers avoid the pitfalls of cognitive biases. This research aims to assess the extent to which software testers know the influence of cognitive biases on their work. Our study was conducted in two incremental steps: a survey and a controlled experiment. Firstly, we developed a questionnaire survey designed to reveal the extent of software testers' knowledge about cognitive biases and their awareness of these biases' influence on testing. We contacted software professionals in different environments and gathered valid data from 60 practitioners. The survey results suggest that software professionals are aware of biases, specifically preconceptions such as confirmation bias, fixation, and convenience. Additionally, biases like optimism, ownership, and blissful ignorance were commonly recognized. In line with other research, we observed that software professionals tend to identify more cognitive biases in others than in their judgments and actions, indicating a vulnerability to bias blind spot. To build on these findings, we performed a controlled experiment with 12 participants to investigate the behaviour and biases exhibited by humans when attempting to solve a hypothetical test problem. Through thematic analysis, we identified prevalent biases such as confirmation bias, pattern recognition and overreliance, sunk cost fallacy, and anchoring bias among participants. Additionally, we found that collaborative problem-solving was a prominent feature, often leading to biases like groupthink. 

In recent years, maintaining test code quality has gained more attention due to increased automation and the growing focus on issues caused during this process. Test code may become long and complex, but maintaining its quality is mostly a manual process, that may not scale in big software projects. Moreover, bugs in test code may give a false impression about the correctness or performance of the production code. Static program analysis (SPA) tools are being used to maintain the quality of software projects nowadays. However, these tools are either not used to analyse test code, or any analysis results on the test code are suppressed. This is especially true since SPA tools are not tailored to generate precise warnings on test code. This paper investigates the use of SPA on test code by employing three state-of-the-art general-purpose static analysers on a curated set of projects used in the industry and a random sample of relatively popular and large open-source C/C++ projects. We have found a number of built-in code checking modules that can detect quality issues in the test code. However, these checkers need some tailoring to obtain relevant results. We observed design choices in test frameworks that raise noisy warnings in analysers and propose a set of augmentations to the checkers or the analysis framework to obtain precise warnings from static analysers.

During testing of parallel systems, which allow asynchronous communication, test flakiness is sometimes avoided by explicitly inserting delays in test code. The choice of delay approach can be a trade-off between short-term gain and long-term robustness. In this work, we present an approach for automatic detection and classification of delay insertions, with the goal of identifying those that could be made more robust. The approach has been implemented using an open-source compiler tooling framework and validated using test code from the telecom industry. © 2020 Association for Computing Machinery.

One of the major advantages of Model-Driven Engineering is the possibility to early assess crucial system properties, in order to identify issues that are easier and cheaper to solve at design level than at code level. An example of such a property is the timing behaviour of a real-time application, where an early indication that the timing constraints might not be met can help avoiding costly re-designs late in the development process. In this paper we provide a model-driven round-trip transformation chain for (i) applying a flow analysis to executable models described in terms of the Action Language for Foundational UML (Alf), and (ii) back-propagating analysis results to Alf models for further investigation. Alf models are transformed into the input format for an analysis tool that identifies flow facts, i. e., information about loop bounds and infeasible paths in the model. Flow facts can be used, for instance, when estimating the worst-case execution time for the analysed model. We evaluated the approach through a set of benchmark models of various size and complexity.