Siouxland Section Computer Society Speaker Event: Improving Software Quality: Strategies, Techniques, and Tools for Test Evolution

Title of the talk: Improving Software Quality: Strategies, Techniques, and Tools for Test Evolution
Description: Maintaining high software quality requires test suites that keep up with frequent code changes, yet developers still struggle with deciding which tests to update, how to strengthen existing tests, and how to identify tests that no longer add value. This talk highlights three research contributions that address these challenges in test evolution. The first part introduces a technique that identifies tests affected by code changes in Continuous Integration and recommends tests that may need updates, making test maintenance more efficient. The second part compares manual test amplification with automated approaches, including techniques powered by Large Language Models. These automated methods substantially improve code coverage and bring complementary strengths, though their results still require validation. The final part presents insights into how and why developers delete tests. Most deletions are small and incremental and driven by project-specific needs, and current automated reduction techniques recover only some redundant tests. Together, these studies provide a data-driven view of how tests evolve and present techniques that support more effective and efficient test maintenance.
Speaker: Prof. Ajay Jha, North Dakota State University
Short bio: Dr. Ajay Jha is an Assistant Professor at North Dakota State University. Before joining NDSU, he spent over two years as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Alberta and three years at Kyungpook National University, where he also earned his Ph.D. in 2017. He brings more than five years of industry experience, during which he co-founded two startups and worked as a business development manager in two organizations. At NDSU, he leads the Software Testing and Maintenance (STAM) Lab, where his research focuses on mining large-scale software repositories to uncover real-world challenges in software quality, reliability, and maintainability, and on developing new techniques and tools to address these issues. He has served as a session chair, program committee member, and reviewer for leading conferences and journals, including MSR, ICSME, IEEE TSE, and ACM TOSEM.
Co-sponsored by: EECS, South Dakota State University
Speaker(s): , Ajay Jha
Room: 218, Bldg: Daktronics Engineering Hall, DEH 218, South Dakota State University, Brookings, South Dakota, United States, 57006