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An empirical investigation into the impact of refactoring on regression testing
It is widely believed that refactoring improves software quality and developer’s productivity by making it easier to maintain and understand software systems. On the other hand, some believe that refactoring has the risk of functionality regression and increased testing cost. This paper investigates the impact of refactoring edits on regression tests using the version history of Java open source projects: (1) Are there adequate regression tests for refactoring in practice? (2) How many of existing regression tests are relevant to refactoring edits and thus need to be re-run for the new version? (3) What proportion of failure-inducing changes are relevant to refactorings? By using a refactoring reconstruction analysis and a change impact analysis in tandem, we investigate the relationship between the types and locations of refactoring edits identified by RefFinder and the affecting changes and affected tests identified by the FaultTracer change impact analysis. The results on three open source projects, JMeter, XMLSecurity, and ANT, show that only 22% of refactored methods and fields are tested by existing regression tests. While refactorings only constitutes 8% of atomic changes, 38% of affected tests are relevant to refactorings. Furthermore, refactorings are involved in almost a half of failed test cases. These results call for new automated regression test augmentation and selection techniques for validating refactoring edits.Electrical and Computer Engineerin
Automatic Repair of Real Bugs: An Experience Report on the Defects4J Dataset
Defects4J is a large, peer-reviewed, structured dataset of real-world Java
bugs. Each bug in Defects4J is provided with a test suite and at least one
failing test case that triggers the bug. In this paper, we report on an
experiment to explore the effectiveness of automatic repair on Defects4J. The
result of our experiment shows that 47 bugs of the Defects4J dataset can be
automatically repaired by state-of- the-art repair. This sets a baseline for
future research on automatic repair for Java. We have manually analyzed 84
different patches to assess their real correctness. In total, 9 real Java bugs
can be correctly fixed with test-suite based repair. This analysis shows that
test-suite based repair suffers from under-specified bugs, for which trivial
and incorrect patches still pass the test suite. With respect to practical
applicability, it takes in average 14.8 minutes to find a patch. The experiment
was done on a scientific grid, totaling 17.6 days of computation time. All
their systems and experimental results are publicly available on Github in
order to facilitate future research on automatic repair
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