Shamshiri, S., Campos, J., Fraser, G. et al. (1 more author) (2017) Disposable Testing: Avoiding Maintenance of Generated Unit Tests by Throwing Them Away. In: 39th International Conference on Software Engineering. 39th International Conference on Software Engineering, 20-28 May 2017, Buenos Aires, Argentina. IEEE , pp. 207-209. ISBN 978-1-5386-1589-8
Abstract
Developers write unit tests together with program code, and then maintain these tests as the program evolves. Since writing good tests can be difficult and tedious, unit tests can so be generated automatically. However, maintaining these tests(e.g., when APIs change, or, when tests represent outdated and changed behavior), is still a manual task. Because automatically generated tests may have no clear purpose other than covering code, maintaining them may be more difficult than maintaining manually written tests. Could this maintenance be avoided by simply generating new tests after each change, and disposing the old ones? We propose disposable testing: Tests are generated to reveal any behavioral differences caused by a code change, and are thrown away once the developer confirms whether these changes were intended or not. However, this idea raises several research challenges: First, are standard automated test generation techniques good enough to produce tests that may berelied upon to reveal changes as effectively as an incrementally built regression test suite? Second, does disposable testing reduce the overall effort, or would developers need to inspect more generated tests compared to just maintaining existing ones?
Metadata
Item Type: | Proceedings Paper |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017 IEEE. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Software Engineering Companion (ICSE-C), 2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Computer Science (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 30 May 2017 15:13 |
Last Modified: | 19 Dec 2022 13:36 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-C.2017.100 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | IEEE |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1109/ICSE-C.2017.100 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:116993 |