Will My Tests Tell Me If I Break This Code?
| Autor: | Niedermayr, Rainer, Juergens, Elmar, Wagner, Stefan |
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| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Proceedings of the International Workshop on Continuous Software Evolution and Delivery (CSED '16). ACM, 2016 |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.1145/2896941.2896944 |
| Popis: | Automated tests play an important role in software evolution because they can rapidly detect faults introduced during changes. In practice, code-coverage metrics are often used as criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of test suites with focus on regression faults. However, code coverage only expresses which portion of a system has been executed by tests, but not how effective the tests actually are in detecting regression faults. Our goal was to evaluate the validity of code coverage as a measure for test effectiveness. To do so, we conducted an empirical study in which we applied an extreme mutation testing approach to analyze the tests of open-source projects written in Java. We assessed the ratio of pseudo-tested methods (those tested in a way such that faults would not be detected) to all covered methods and judged their impact on the software project. The results show that the ratio of pseudo-tested methods is acceptable for unit tests but not for system tests (that execute large portions of the whole system). Therefore, we conclude that the coverage metric is only a valid effectiveness indicator for unit tests. Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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