Test Naming Failures. An Exploratory Study of Bad Naming Practices in Test Code

Unit tests are a key component during the software development process, helping ensure that a developer\u27s code is functioning as expected. Developers interact with unit tests when trying to understand, maintain, and when updating code. Good test names are essential for making these various processes easier, which is important considering the substantial costs and effort of software maintenance. Despite this, it has been found that the quality of test code is often lacking, specifically when it comes to test names. When a test fails, its name is often the first thing developers will see when trying to fix the failure, therefore it is important that names are of high quality in order to help with the debugging process. The objective of this work was to find anti-patterns having to do with test method names that may have a negative impact on developer comprehension. In order to do this, a grounded theory study was conducted on 12 open-source Java and C# GitHub projects. From this dataset, many patterns were discovered to be common throughout the test code. Some of these patterns fit the necessary criteria of anti-patterns that would probably hinder developer comprehension. With the avoidance of these anti-patterns it is believed that developers will be able to write better test names that can help speed the time to debug errors as test names will be more comprehensive