An Empirical Investigation on the Readability of Manual and - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
An Empirical Investigation on the Readability of Manual and Generated Test Cases G. Grano, S. Scalabrino, H. C. Gall, R. Oliveto ICPC ERA 2018, 27-28 May, Gothenburg (Sweden) grano@ifi.uzh.ch giograno90 Unit Test First defensive line
An Empirical Investigation
and Generated Test Cases
ICPC ERA 2018, 27-28 May, Gothenburg (Sweden)
grano@ifi.uzh.ch giograno90 First defensive line against bug introduction
2 — Giovanni Grano @ s.e.a.l. Tests evolve with code
3 — Giovanni Grano @ s.e.a.l. Time spent with tests 1
> 416 software engineers for over 13 years of recorded working time in the IDE > Developers spend 25% of their time engineering tests in their IDE > They look at tests when errors occur
1 Beller et.al - When, How, and Why Developers (Do Not) Test in Their IDEs 4 — Giovanni Grano @ s.e.a.l. Same effort in writing good quality tests and production code
> Changes are easier > Error comprehension
5 — Giovanni Grano @ s.e.a.l. Are tests first-class citizens?
6 — Giovanni Grano @ s.e.a.l. Study Design
> 3 Apache open-source projects > state-of-the-art readability model 2 > pairs of <test-production code> > Wilcoxon Test
2 Scalabrino et.al. - Improving Code Readability Models with Textual Features - ICPC 2016 8 — Giovanni Grano @ s.e.a.l. Features
> Structural Features (e.g. line length) > Visual Features (e.g. indentation) > Text-Based Code Readability Features (e.g. Comments and Identifiers Consistency)
9 — Giovanni Grano @ s.e.a.l. Are test cases and classes equally readable?
10 — Giovanni Grano @ s.e.a.l. Test cases are less readable than the code they exercise
Are generated and manual tests equally readable?
13 — Giovanni Grano @ s.e.a.l. Manually written tests are more readable!
Future work
Why readability of test is lower?
> good proxy for quality? > increase awareness > support test quality
Can we improve the tools?
15 — Giovanni Grano @ s.e.a.l.