No abstract

Code coverage is successfully used to guide white box test design and evaluate the respective test completeness. However, simple overall coverage ratios are often not precise enough to effectively help when a (regression) test suite needs to be reassessed and evolved after software change. We present an approach for test suite assessment and improvement that utilizes code coverage information, but on a more detailed level and adds further evaluation aspects derived from the coverage. The main use of the method is to aid various test suite evolution situations such as removal, refactoring and extension of test cases as a result of code change or test suite efficiency enhancement. We define various metrics to express different properties of test suites beyond simple code coverage ratios, and present the assessment and improvement process as an iterative application of different improvement goals and more specific sub-activities. The method is demonstrated by applying it to improve the tests of one of our experimental systems.

Abstract-Newer technologies -programming languages, environments, libraries -change very rapidly. However, various internal and external constraints often prevent projects from quickly adopting to these changes. Customers may require specific platform compatibility from a software vendor, for example. In this work, we deal with such an issue in the context of the C++ programming language. Our industrial partner is required to use SDKs that support only older C++ language editions. They, however, would like to allow their developers to use the newest language constructs in their code. To address this problem, we created a source code transformation framework to automatically backport source code written according to the C++11 standard to its functionally equivalent C++03 variant. With our framework developers are free to exploit the latest language features, while production code is still built by using a restricted set of available language constructs. This paper reports on the technical details of the transformation engine, and our experiences in applying it on two large industrial code bases and four open-source systems. Our solution is freely available and open-source.