# State-Of-The-Practice in Quality Assurance in Java-Based Open Source Software Development

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09665 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09665/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Leveraging Large Language Models for Enhancing the Understandability of Generated Unit Tests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11710/) (2024)
- [Are We All Using Agents the Same Way? An Empirical Study of Core and Peripheral Developers Use of Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20106/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To ensure the quality of software systems, software engineers can make use of a variety of quality assurance approaches, such as software testing, modern code review, automated static analysis, and build automation. Each of these quality assurance practices has been studied in depth in isolation, but there is a clear knowledge gap when it comes to our understanding of how these approaches are being used in conjunction or not. In our study, we broadly investigate whether and how these quality assurance approaches are being used in conjunction in the development of 1,454 popular open source software projects on GitHub. Our study indicates that typically projects do not follow all quality assurance practices together with high intensity. In fact, we only observe weak correlation among some quality assurance practices. In general, our study provides a deeper understanding of how existing quality assurance approaches are currently being used in Java-based open source software development. Besides, we specifically zoomed in on the more mature projects in our dataset, and generally, we observe that more mature projects are more intense in their application of the quality assurance practices, with more focus on their ASAT usage and code reviewing, but no strong change in their CI usage.