Ann: a domain-specific language for the effective design and validation of Java annotations

This paper describes a new modelling language for the effective design and validation of Java annotations. Since their inclusion in the 5th edition of Java, annotations have grown from a useful tool for the addition of meta-data to play a central role in many popular software projects. Usually they are not conceived in isolation, but in groups, with dependency and integrity constraints between them. However, the native support provided by Java for expressing this design is very limited. To over come its deficiencies and make explicit the rich conceptual model which lies behind a set of annotations,we propose a domain-specific modelling language.The proposal has been implemented as an Eclipse plug-in, including an editor and an integrated code generator that synthesises annotation processors. The environmental so integrates a model finder,able to detectun satisfiable constraints between different annotations, and to provide examples of correct annotation usages for validation. The language has been tested using a real set of annotations from the Java Persistence API(JPA).Within this subset we have found enough rich semantics expressible with Ann and omitted nowadays by the Java language, which shows the benefits of Ann in are levant field of application

Evaluating Software Testing Techniques: A Systematic Mapping Study

Software testing techniques are crucial for detecting faults in software and reducing the risk of using it. As such, it is important that we have a good understanding of how to evaluate these techniques for their efficiency, scalability, applicability, and effectiveness at finding faults. This thesis enhances our understanding of testing technique evaluations by providing an overview of the state of the art in research. To accomplish this we utilize a systematic mapping study; structuring the field and identifying research gaps and publication trends. We then present a small case study demonstrating how our mapping study can be used to assist researchers in evaluating their own software testing techniques. We find that a majority of evaluations are empirical evaluations in the form of case studies and experiments, most of these evaluations are of low quality based on proper methodology guidelines, and that relatively few papers in the field discuss how testing techniques should be evaluated