Assert Use in GitHub Projects

Abstract

Asserts have long been a strongly recommended (if non-functional) adjunct to programs. They certainly don't add any user-evident feature value; and it can take quite some skill and effort to devise and add useful asserts. However, they are believed to add considerable value to the developer. Certainly, they can help with automated verification; but even in the absence of that, claimed advantages include improved understandability, maintainability, easier fault localization and diagnosis, all eventually leading to better software quality. We focus on this latter claim, and use a large dataset of asserts in C and C++ programs to explore the connection between asserts and defect occurrence. Our data suggests a connection: functions with asserts do have significantly fewer defects. This indicates that asserts do play an important role in software quality; we therefore explored further the factors that play a role in assertion placement: specifically, process factors (such as developer experience and ownership) and product factors, particularly interprocedural factors, exploring how the placement of assertions in functions are influenced by local and global network properties of the callgraph. Finally, we also conduct a differential analysis of assertion use across different application domains.

A Large Scale Study of Multiple Programming Languages and Code Quality

“…Casalnuovo et al study 100 most popular C and C++ projects in GitHub to understand the correlation between asserts and defect occurrence and their results show that asserts have an effect on software quality [22]. Vasilescu et al use mixed-methods approach by surveying thousands of developers and analysing thousands of projects in GitHub to investigate the relationship between gender and tenure diversity on team productivity and turnover [23].…”

Understanding GCC builtins to develop better tools

“…We analyzed projects from the popular GitHub code-hosting service. Similar to other large empirical studies [5,44,64], we selected projects based on popularity, specifically the number of GitHub stars [2]. To obtain about 5,000 projects, we downloaded projects down to 80 stars.…”

“…For example, for Java, the usage of general language features [11,44], fields [62], inheritance [61], exception handling [1,38,57], lambda features [30] and async constructs on Android [40] have been studied. For C++ projects, the usage of templates [63], generic constructs [60], concurrency constructs [64] and asserts [5] have been studied. The latter also considered C projects, similar to Nagappan et al 's study [34] of the usage and harmfulness of the goto construct.…”

Characterizing the Usage, Evolution and Impact of Java Annotations in Practice

“…Developers take efforts to address the problems as after-thoughts, calling for dedicated tool that can support the process of systematic annotation testing. (5) For annotation add changes, three major reasons are clearing IDE warning (31.5% ), clarifying specific facts about usage (33.6%), and introducing new feature (25.5%). There also exist some annotation move changes, which inconsistently move between outer and nested program elements.…”