arXiv subjects

Luigi Libero Lucio Starace

Publications and source records attributed to Luigi Libero Lucio Starace.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Neural Embeddings for Web Testing

Web test automation techniques often rely on crawlers to infer models of web applications for automated test generation. However, current crawlers rely on state equivalence algorithms that struggle to distinguish near-duplicate pages, often leading to redundant test cases and incomplete coverage of application functionality. In this paper, we present a model-based test generation approach that employs transformer-based Siamese neural networks (SNNs) to infer web application models more accurately. By learning similarity-based representations, SNNs capture structural and textual relationships among web pages, improving near-duplicate detection during crawling and enhancing the quality of inferred models, and thus, the effectiveness of generated test suites. Our evaluation across nine web apps shows that SNNs outperform state-of-the-art techniques in near-duplicate detection, resulting in superior web app models with an average F-1 score improvement of 56%. These enhanced models enable the generation of more effective test suites that achieve higher code coverage, with improvements ranging from 6% to 21% and averaging at 12%.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Large Language Models in the Travel Domain: An Industrial Experience

Online property booking platforms are widely used and rely heavily on consistent, up-to-date information about accommodation facilities, often sourced from third-party providers. However, these external data sources are frequently affected by incomplete or inconsistent details, which can frustrate users and result in a loss of market. In response to these challenges, we present an industrial case study involving the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into CALEIDOHOTELS, a property reservation platform developed by FERVENTO. We evaluate two well-known LLMs in this context: Mistral 7B, fine-tuned with QLoRA, and Mixtral 8x7B, utilized with a refined system prompt. Both models were assessed based on their ability to generate consistent and homogeneous descriptions while minimizing hallucinations. Mixtral 8x7B outperformed Mistral 7B in terms of completeness (99.6% vs. 93%), precision (98.8% vs. 96%), and hallucination rate (1.2% vs. 4%), producing shorter yet more concise content (249 vs. 277 words on average). However, this came at a significantly higher computational cost: 50GB VRAM and $1.61/hour versus 5GB and $0.16/hour for Mistral 7B. Our findings provide practical insights into the trade-offs between model quality and resource efficiency, offering guidance for deploying LLMs in production environments and demonstrating their effectiveness in enhancing the consistency and reliability of accommodation data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

REST in Pieces: RESTful Design Rule Violations in Student-Built Web Apps

In Computer Science Bachelor's programs, software quality is often underemphasized due to limited time and a focus on foundational skills, leaving many students unprepared for industry expectations. To better understand the typical quality of student code and inform both education and hiring practices, we analyze 40 full-stack web applications developed in a third-year Web Technologies course. Using an automated static analysis pipeline, we assess adherence to REST API design rules. Results reveal frequent violations of foundational conventions, such as missing hyphens in endpoint paths (98%), incorrect pluralization (88%), and misuse of HTTP methods (83%). These findings highlight the need for more focused instruction on API design and support the adoption of automated tools to improve code quality in student projects.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Rookie Mistakes: Measuring Software Quality in Student Projects to Guide Educational Enhancement

When teaching Programming and Software Engineering in Bachelor's Degree programs, the emphasis on creating functional software projects often overshadows the focus on software quality, a trend that aligns with ACM curricula recommendations. Software Engineering courses are typically introduced later in the curriculum, and can generally allocate only limited time to quality-related topics, leaving educators with the challenge of deciding which quality aspects to prioritize. In this decision, the literature offers limited guidance, as most existing studies focus on code written by novice students and small code units, making it unclear whether those findings extend to intermediate-level students with foundational object-oriented programming skills working on more complex software projects. To address this gap, we analyze 83 object-oriented team projects developed by 172 university students across 4 different editions of the Object-Oriented Programming course. We apply a static analysis pipeline used in prior research to assess software quality, combining SonarQube and ArchUnit to detect code smells and architectural anti-patterns. Our findings highlight recurring quality issues and offer concrete evidence of the challenges students face at this stage, providing valuable guidance for educators aiming to continuously improve Software Engineering curricula and promote quality-oriented development practices.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2021

Web Application Testing: Using Tree Kernels to Detect Near-duplicate States in Automated Model Inference

In the context of End-to-End testing of web applications, automated exploration techniques (a.k.a. crawling) are widely used to infer state-based models of the site under test. These models, in which states represent features of the web application and transitions represent reachability relationships, can be used for several model-based testing tasks, such as test case generation. However, current exploration techniques often lead to models containing many near-duplicate states, i.e., states representing slightly different pages that are in fact instances of the same feature. This has a negative impact on the subsequent model-based testing tasks, adversely affecting, for example, size, running time, and achieved coverage of generated test suites. As a web page can be naturally represented by its tree-structured DOM representation, we propose a novel near-duplicate detection technique to improve the model inference of web applications, based on Tree Kernel (TK) functions. TKs are a class of functions that compute similarity between tree-structured objects, largely investigated and successfully applied in the Natural Language Processing domain. To evaluate the capability of the proposed approach in detecting near-duplicate web pages, we conducted preliminary classification experiments on a freely-available massive dataset of about 100k manually annotated web page pairs. We compared the classification performance of the proposed approach with other state-of-the-art near-duplicate detection techniques. Preliminary results show that our approach performs better than state-of-the-art techniques in the near-duplicate detection classification task. These promising results show that TKs can be applied to near-duplicate detection in the context of web application model inference, and motivate further research in this direction.

cs.SE↗