@book{ReschkeTaeumelPapeetal.2018,
  author    = {Reschke, Jakob and Taeumel, Marcel and Pape, Tobias and Niephaus, Fabio and Hirschfeld, Robert},
  title     = {Towards version control in object-based systems},
  volume    = {121},
  publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  isbn      = {978-3-86956-430-2},
  issn      = {1613-5652},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-410812},
  publisher      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {100},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {Version control is a widely used practice among software developers. It reduces the risk of changing their software and allows them to manage different configurations and to collaborate with others more efficiently. This is amplified by code sharing platforms such as GitHub or Bitbucket. Most version control systems track files (e.g., Git, Mercurial, and Subversion do), but some programming environments do not operate on files, but on objects instead (many Smalltalk implementations do). Users of such environments want to use version control for their objects anyway. Specialized version control systems, such as the ones available for Smalltalk systems (e.g., ENVY/Developer and Monticello), focus on a small subset of objects that can be versioned. Most of these systems concentrate on the tracking of methods, classes, and configurations of these. Other user-defined and user-built objects are either not eligible for version control at all, tracking them involves complicated workarounds, or a fixed, domain-unspecific serialization format is used that does not equally suit all kinds of objects. Moreover, these version control systems that are specific to a programming environment require their own code sharing platforms; popular, well-established platforms for file-based version control systems cannot be used or adapter solutions need to be implemented and maintained. To improve the situation for version control of arbitrary objects, a framework for tracking, converting, and storing of objects is presented in this report. It allows editions of objects to be stored in an exchangeable, existing backend version control system. The platforms of the backend version control system can thus be reused. Users and objects have control over how objects are captured for the purpose of version control. Domain-specific requirements can be implemented. The storage format (i.e. the file format, when file-based backend version control systems are used) can also vary from one object to another. Different editions of objects can be compared and sets of changes can be applied to graphs of objects. A generic way for capturing and restoring that supports most kinds of objects is described. It models each object as a collection of slots. Thus, users can begin to track their objects without first having to implement version control supplements for their own kinds of objects. The proposed architecture is evaluated using a prototype implementation that can be used to track objects in Squeak/Smalltalk with Git. The prototype improves the suboptimal standing of user objects with respect to version control described above and also simplifies some version control tasks for classes and methods as well. It also raises new problems, which are discussed in this report as well.},
  language  = {en}
}
@book{DuerschReinMattisetal.2022,
  author    = {D{\"u}rsch, Falco and Rein, Patrick and Mattis, Toni and Hirschfeld, Robert},
  title     = {Learning from failure},
  number    = {145},
  publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  isbn      = {978-3-86956-528-6},
  issn      = {1613-5652},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-53755},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-537554},
  publisher      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {87},
  year      = {2022},
  abstract  = {Regression testing is a widespread practice in today's software industry to ensure software product quality. Developers derive a set of test cases, and execute them frequently to ensure that their change did not adversely affect existing functionality. As the software product and its test suite grow, the time to feedback during regression test sessions increases, and impedes programmer productivity: developers wait longer for tests to complete, and delays in fault detection render fault removal increasingly difficult. Test case prioritization addresses the problem of long feedback loops by reordering test cases, such that test cases of high failure probability run first, and test case failures become actionable early in the testing process. We ask, given test execution schedules reconstructed from publicly available data, to which extent can their fault detection efficiency improved, and which technique yields the most efficient test schedules with respect to APFD? To this end, we recover regression 6200 test sessions from the build log files of Travis CI, a popular continuous integration service, and gather 62000 accompanying changelists. We evaluate the efficiency of current test schedules, and examine the prioritization results of state-of-the-art lightweight, history-based heuristics. We propose and evaluate a novel set of prioritization algorithms, which connect software changes and test failures in a matrix-like data structure. Our studies indicate that the optimization potential is substantial, because the existing test plans score only 30\% APFD. The predictive power of past test failures proves to be outstanding: simple heuristics, such as repeating tests with failures in recent sessions, result in efficiency scores of 95\% APFD. The best-performing matrix-based heuristic achieves a similar score of 92.5\% APFD. In contrast to prior approaches, we argue that matrix-based techniques are useful beyond the scope of effective prioritization, and enable a number of use cases involving software maintenance. We validate our findings from continuous integration processes by extending a continuous testing tool within development environments with means of test prioritization, and pose further research questions. We think that our findings are suited to propel adoption of (continuous) testing practices, and that programmers' toolboxes should contain test prioritization as an existential productivity tool.},
  language  = {en}
}