Unit testing is widely advocated for improving software reliability and maintainability, yet little is known about how developers experience its interaction with refactoring and technical debt. In my early-stage doctoral research, I conducted a preliminary study with 109 professional developers to investigate how unit test suites support—or hinder—refactoring efforts. The findings reveal developer expectations that unit test suites should enable safe, productive change, but also frustrations with fragile tests that break during refactoring. This paper outlines the insights gained, lessons learned about conducting empirical software engineering research, and my evolving proposal: to define and empirically ground the concept of “unit test suite resilience to refactoring.” I present the open questions I find personally meaningful, and describe how I intend to explore frameworks and practices that increase the adaptability of unit test suites.

The maintainability of source code is a vital quality of resilient software systems and speaks to the ability of software engineering teams to modify source code quickly. For organizations seeking to build resilient software systems, it is crucial to consider source code maintainability because rapidly changing source code in response to new adversities is critical to the long-term resilience of software systems. In this study, we review relevant literature on three popular software development practices that aim to improve the maintainability of source code: test-driven development, refactoring, and pair programming. Our review provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of these practices and highlights their potential role in enhancing the resilience of software systems.

Specials medications are personalized formulations manufactured on demand for patients with unique prescription requirements and constitute an essential component of patient treatment. Specials are becoming increasingly in demand due to the need for personalized and precision medicine. The timely provision of optimal personalized medicine, however, is challenging, subject to strict regulatory processes, and is expert intensive. In this paper, we propose a new medical formulation engine (MFE) that performs semantic search across multiple disparate formulations archives to enable data driven formulation intelligence. We develop a new platform for medical formulations recognition (MFR) that curates a new dataset comprising formulations and non-formulations (clinical) text and uses a novel pipeline encompassing deep feature extraction and one-class support vector machine learning. The proposed MFR framework demonstrates promising performance and can be used as a benchmark for future research in formulations recognition.

The present study is an empirical investigation of characteristics associated with membership in Engineers Without Borders (EWB). EWB is an international organization that has grown rapidly over the past decade. Despite this growth, few studies have investigated the characteristics of EWB members. The present study investigates these characteristics via survey research targeting the student body at a large state university in the American West.

Many universities face disturbing trends in the retention, underrepresentation and socialization of women students in engineering. The focus of this present study is the retention of first-year women students currently enrolled in a large state college of engineering in the Rocky Mountain region. Eight hour-long focus groups were conducted consisting of four to ten first-year women in a first-year engineering design projects course. Participants were asked a structured set of questions to investigate several topics. These focus groups were video-taped and later transcribed for analysis. Six research questions were posed for the current study: Do women express a loss of interest during the first year of the program?; Is there a chilly climate for first-year women in the college?; Do women's self-efficacy levels change during the first year of the program?; Do academic performance levels play a role in women's retention in engineering during the first year?; Do women have adequate support structures in the college during the first year?; Does the structure of the academic program instill career awareness in the first year? Implications for strategies to boost retention and an explication of the themes from the qualitative analysis will be discussed in the paper.