Analyzing Refactorings' Impact on Regression Test Cases

Gao, Yuan; Liu, Hui; Fan, Xiaojing; Niu, Zhendong; Nyirongo, Bridget

doi:10.1109/compsac.2015.16

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…There is a need for controlled experiments and industry case studies to compare the effectiveness of the proposed test repair and breakage prevention approaches. [22] An Extensible Heuristic-Based Framework for GUI Test Case Maintenance S3 Gao et al [51] Analyzing Refactorings' Impact on Regression Test Cases S4 Xu et al [20] Using Genetic Algorithms to Repair JUnit Test Cases S5 Pinto et al [52] Understanding Myths and Realities of Test-suite Evolution S6 Mirzaaghaei et al [53] Supporting Test Suite Evolution through Test Case Adaptation S7 Huang et al [54] Repairing GUI test suites using a genetic algorithm S8 Cunha and Maria Ana Casal [55] Automatic maintenance of test scripts S9 Li et al [56] ATOM: Automatic Maintenance of GUI Test Scripts for Evolving Mobile Applications S10 Zhang et al [57] Automatically repairing broken workflows for evolving GUI applications S11 Atif Memon [58] Automatically repairing event sequence-based GUI test suites for regression testing S12 Mirzaaghaei et al [59] Automatically repairing test cases for evolving method declarations S13 Rapos et al [60] Examining the co-evolution relationship between Simulink Models and their test cases S14 Priya et al [61] GUI Test Script Repair in Regression Testing S15 Gove et al [62] Identifying infeasible GUI test cases using support vector machines and induced grammars S16 Grechanik et al [63] Maintaining and evolving GUI-directed test scripts S17 Yang et al [64] Specification-Based Test Repair Using a Lightweight Formal Method S18 Gao et al [6] SITAR: GUI Test Script Repair S19 Mirzaaghaei et al [65] TestCareAssistant: Automatic Repair of Test Case Compilation Errors S20 Hammoudi et al [66] WATERFALL: an incremental approach for repairing recordreplay tests of web applications S21 Choudhary et al [7] WATER: Web Application TEst Repair S22 Atif Memon and Mary Lou Regression testing of GUIs…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A systematic literature review of test breakage prevention and repair techniques

Imtiaz

Sherin

Khan

et al. 2019

Information and Software Technology

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Context: When an application evolves, some of the developed test cases break. Discarding broken test cases causes a significant waste of effort and leads to test suites that are less effective and have lower coverage. Test repair approaches evolve test suites along with applications by repairing the broken test cases.Objective: Numerous studies are published on test repair approaches every year. It is important to summarise and consolidate the existing knowledge in the area to provide directions to researchers and practitioners. This research work provides a systematic literature review in the area of test case repair and breakage prevention, aiming to guide researchers and practitioners in the field of software testing. Method:We followed the standard protocol for conducting a systematic literature review. First, research goals were defined using the Goal Question Metric (GQM). Then we formulate research questions corresponding to each goal. Finally, metrics are extracted from the included papers. Based on the defined selection criteria a final set of 41 primary studies are included for analysis. Results:The selection process resulted in 5 journal papers, and 36 conference papers. We present a taxonomy that lists the causes of test case breakages extracted from the literature. We found that only four proposed test repair tools are publicly available. Most studies evaluated their approaches on open-source case studies. Conclusion:There is significant room for future research on test repair techniques. Despite the positive trend of evaluating approaches on large scale open source studies, there is a clear lack of results from studies done in a real industrial context. Few tools are publicly available which lowers the potential of adaption by industry practitioners.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A systematic literature review of test breakage prevention and repair techniques

Imtiaz

Sherin

Khan

et al. 2019

Information and Software Technology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The authors conducted experiments which included almost thirteen thousand developers and four datasets. The authors report that refactoring was frequently applied by the developers, however, the methods of application were mostly manual and without the assistance of any tools for automatic refactoring [16]. Similarly, the experiments conducted in [17] shows that the developers performed approximately 11% more manual refactoring than automated refactoring.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, discoverability, lack of familiarity and trust, and productivity are the few factors that results in developers refactoring the code manually [14][15]. Authors in [16] discuss that approximately 90% of the developers prefer performing manual refactoring and do so as well. The authors conducted experiments which included almost thirteen thousand developers and four datasets.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Post-Refactoring Recovery of Unit Tests: An Automated Approach

Qusef

Murad²,

Alsalhi

et al. 2023

Int. J. Interact. Mob. Technol.

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— In application development lifecycle, specifically in test-driven development, refactoring plays a crucial role in sustaining ease. However, in-spite of bringing ease, refactoring does not ensure the desired behaviour of code after it is applied. Because refactoring tends to worsen the alignments between source code and its corresponding units. One significant solution to the aforementioned issue is the technique called unit testing. As unit testing enable the developers to confidently apply refactoring while avoiding undesired code behaviour. Unit testing provides effective preventive measures for avoiding bugs by providing immediate feedback, thus assisting to mitigate the fear of change. In this work, we present a tool called GreenRefPlus which efficiently enables the developers to maintain the veracity of code after the process of refactoring is applied. The proposed tool provides automatic recovery for the unit tests after the code is refactored. In this work, we consider Java as our target programming language and we focus on five various types of refactoring, which include Rename Method, Extract Method, Move Method, Parameter Addition and Parameter Removal. Our experiments indicate that the proposed tool GreenRefPlus enables us to consistently refactor the code and apply unit tests. The results presented in our work reveal that the proposed tool assists developers in saving approximately 43% of the total time required to manually recover from broken unit tests.

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“…Another problem of refactoring implementation is its impact on the test cases [7]. Many experiments related to the test maintenance of refactored programs were performed in Java [8], [9], [10]. In [8], it was shown that tests often require additional handling when the production code is refactored.…”

Section: Iirelated Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many experiments related to the test maintenance of refactored programs were performed in Java [8], [9], [10]. In [8], it was shown that tests often require additional handling when the production code is refactored. To handle this, a prototype developed in Eclipse was discussed in [9].…”

Section: Iirelated Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Review of Automated Code Refactoring of C# Programs

Derezinska,

Sygocki

2023

Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems

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Code refactoring is supported by many Integrated Development Environments. This paper is focused on the automated code refactoring of C# programs. We have analyzed more than sixty refactorings available in three popular IDEs. We cataloged different restrictions, defects, and other quality concerns associated with the implementation of the refactorings, taking into account both modification of the production code and of the corresponding test cases. An extension to automate selected refactoring improvements has been developed for the ReSharper platform and experimentally verified.

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Analyzing Refactorings' Impact on Regression Test Cases

Cited by 5 publications

References 21 publications

A systematic literature review of test breakage prevention and repair techniques

A systematic literature review of test breakage prevention and repair techniques

Post-Refactoring Recovery of Unit Tests: An Automated Approach

Review of Automated Code Refactoring of C# Programs

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