Validating pragmatic reuse tasks by leveraging existing test suites

Abstract

SUMMARYTraditional industrial practice often involves the ad hoc reuse of source code that was not designed for that reuse. Such pragmatic reuse tasks play an important role in disciplined software development. Pragmatic reuse has been seen as problematic due to a lack of systematic support, and an inability to validate that the reused code continues to operate correctly within the target system. Although recent work has successfully systematized support for pragmatic reuse tasks, the issue of validation remains unaddressed. In this paper, we present a novel approach and tool to semi‐automatically reuse and transform relevant portions of the test suite associated with pragmatically reused code, as a means to validate that the relevant constraints from the originating system continue to hold, while minimizing the burden on the developer. We conduct a formal experiment with experienced developers, to compare the application of our approach versus the use of a standard IDE (the ‘manual approach’). We find that, relative to the manual approach, our approach: reduces task completion time; improves instruction coverage by the reused test cases; and improves the correctness of the reused test cases. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Pragmatic source code reuse via execution record and replay

“…Our evaluation does not compare Flashback to other tools that assist the programmer in transplanting code. Examples include Gilligan, developed by Holmes and Walker , and Skipper, developed by Makady and Walker . These tools improve on the traditional copy–paste method in different ways; Skipper uses the existing test suite to test the newly transplanted code where as Gilligan simplifies the process of transplanting additional source code by walking the programmer through the additional source code and keeping track of the reuse plan.…”

“…Finally, we will compare Flashback to code reuse tools other than the traditional copy–paste method. Possible comparisons include Gilligan and Skipper which are static approaches. It remains to be seen whether Flashback can outperform these approaches and whether certain cases lend themselves to one approach over the others.…”

“…, help programmers plan for reuse by prioritizing changes needed to transplant source code. Makady and Walker proposed a solution called Skipper that uses the existing program's test suite to test whether the transplanted code still functions as it did. A key difference from our work is that we aim to minimize the number of changes that are needed, hiding the unnecessary details by using execution information.…”

Artefact Relation Graphs for Unit Test Reuse Recommendation

“…Makady and Walker [29] explore the concept of aiding the reuse of existing tests when the corresponding tested code is reused. This provides an alternative scenario in which RELATEST could be used where the reused tested function is provided as the query function instead of a new function.…”