Understanding Test-to-Code Traceability Links: The Need for a Better Visualizing Model

Aljawabrah, Nadera; Gergely, Tamás; Kharabsheh, Mohammad

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-24305-0_32

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…The IDE extension EZUNIT by Bouillon et al [54] creates links to jump from a test case to the methods under test. Aljawabrah et al [55], [56] visualize the connection between unit tests and the code under test with the TCTRACVIS tool. Their tools shows traceability links in a hierarchical tree graph in both directions: from test to code and from code to test.…”

Section: Related Work: Test Visualizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Does This New Developer Test Fit In? A Visualization to Understand Amplified Test Cases

Brandt

Zaidman

2022

2022 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)

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Developer testing, the practice of software engineers programmatically checking that their own components behave as they expect, has become the norm in today's software projects. With the constantly growing size and complexity of software projects and with the rise of automated test generation tools, understanding a test case is becoming more and more important compared to writing test cases from scratch.This holds especially in the area of developer-centric test amplification, where a tool automatically generates new test cases to improve a developer-maintained test suite. To investigate how visualization can help developers understand and judge test cases, we present the TESTIMPACTGRAPH, a visualization of the call tree and coverage impact of a JUnit test case proposed for amplification. It empowers the developer to drill down into the behavior of a test case, as well as providing them a clear view on how the proposed test case contributes to the coverage of the overall test suite. In a think-aloud study we investigate which information developers seek from the TESTIMPACTGRAPH, how its features can support them in accessing this information, and observations regarding the coverage impact of test cases. We infer ten actionable recommendations on how developer tests can be visualized to help developers understand their behavior and impact.

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Section: Related Work: Test Visualizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Does This New Developer Test Fit In? A Visualization to Understand Amplified Test Cases

Brandt

Zaidman

2022

2022 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)

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“…The main idea of using the traceability recovery approaches is to help software engineers to trace the relationships between unit test and source code, and automatically extract traceability links at low cost and time. The goal of using visualization is to identify November 24, 2020 the disagreement between traceability links inferred from different sources [BNN02].…”

Section: Contributions Of Thesismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Visualization is a process of presenting an abstract and complex data in a remarkable, colour-coordinate, and clear-cut format in forms of images, charts, graphs, diagrams, and tables that can aid in understanding the purpose of data [BNN02].…”

Section: Software Visualizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In our approach, the main goal of using visualization is to support the comprehension and maintenance of traceability links efficiently and effectively, and help to identify the disagreement between traceability links inferred from different sources [BNN02]. It also, can point out places where something is wrong with the tests and/or the code (at least their relationship) in a specific system, understand which code elements are tested by which unit tests, and diminish bugs while updating the existing features of a piece of software or adding new features to it.…”

Section: The Proposed Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Towards Visualization of Unit Test and Source Code Relations

Aljawabrah

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Test-to-code traceability is the ability to relate the test unit and source code artifacts created during the software development life cycle (SDLC). Traceability of test and code relations is fundamental to support various activities of software development such as program comprehension, verification and validation, impact analysis, reuse, maintenance, and software evolution. Notwithstanding its importance, many significant challenges are associated with traceability. One of these challenges is how to support the comprehension and maintenance of these links efficiently and effectively.Visualization is an important part that effectively supports understanding test-tocode relations. It provides enhanced process visibility, helps engineers, developers, and testers to verify the quality of TCT links, and understand which code modules are tested by which unit tests.As there are many sources from where the traceability relations can be inferred, one of the most important questions is to decide which source or combination of sources is the best to determine the test-to-code links. It is obvious that, if these sources disagree, this will make it harder to understand what is going on, what was the goal of the developer, and how the components are really related and change impact analysis can yield false results, etc. Fortunately, visualization can aid this task. The presented approach consists of three parts. The first part consists of the recognition of artifacts from two different areas, source code, and unit test. The second part presents different sources for capturing the links between code and test iv such as a naming convention, last call before assert, and the static call graph. The third part includes the visualization method used to visually present the traceability links inferred from traceability links sources. The trace visualization approach is implemented as a trace visualization tool, which is called TCTracVis.This thesis also provides an empirical study based on the implementation of the presented approach. The approach and its tool support are applied in different software development projects conducted with a group of students, academics, and from industry. The effectiveness and practicability of the presented approach and its tool support have been evaluated. The effectiveness results indicate that the visualization of multilevel test-to-code traceability links, inferred from multiple sources, is more effective for the testers and developers than using visualization of a single source of traceability links. It helps to get a bigger picture of what is going on with the tests, find solutions to the problems in testing, and understand the relationships between test cases and the corresponding units under test. At the same time, the usability results indicate that the participants found that the approach and its tool support usability, and enhance the overall browsing, comprehension, and maintenance of test-to-code traceability links of a system.

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