Dr. Ali Mesbah, professor at UBC, visits our class and answers questions about his paper  (linked below) on how  test assertions are more effective than code and branch coverage for improving test suite effectiveness. Ali also mentions how machine machine generated assertions fare against human written assertions, how mutation testing is making its way into industry use, how being conservative in our claims about SE research may undersell the value of our research.  Our discussion also leads to some exciting ideas for future research in this area!  

This Q&A was recorded live as part of a workshop on Continuous Software Engineering,  at a Senior Topics Course in Empirical Software Engineering at the University of Victoria on Oct 25th, 2020.

 In preparation for today's workshop on continuous software engineering we read/watched materials posted on this page.

In particular, we read this paper before the Q&A:  "Assertions Are Strongly Correlated with Test Suite Effectiveness" by Yucheng Zhang and Ali Mesbah, ESEC/FSE 2015.

This Q&A is also available as a video on YouTube.