Aiding Software Developers to Test with TestNForce

Regression testing is an expensive process because, most of times, all the available test cases are executed. Many techniques of test selection/filtering have been researched and implemented, each having its own strong and weak points. This paper introduces a tool that helps developers and testers to identify the tests that need to be executed after a code change, in order to check for regressions. The implementation is based on dynamic code analysis and the purpose of the tool is to eliminate the time spent on testing using inappropriate test cases (tests that bring no value in checking for regressions). The adequacy, usability and completeness of this tool have been evaluated through the meanings of a user study. During the study, a number of developers used the tool and expressed their opinion about it through questionnaires.Software EngineeringSoftware TechnologyElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Aiding Software Developers to Maintain Developer Tests

Preprint of paper published in: 16th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR), 27-30 March 2012; doi:10.1109/CSMR.2012.12 Unit and integration tests can be invaluable during software maintenance as they help to understand pieces of code, they help with quality assurance and they build up confidence amongst developers. Unfortunately then, previous research has shown that unit tests do not always co-evolve nicely with the production code, thus leaving the software vulnerable. This paper presents TestNForce, a tool that helps developers to identify the unit tests that need to be altered and executed after a code change, thereby reducing the effort needed to keep the unit tests in sync with the changes to the production code. In order to evaluate TestNForce, we perform a user study that evaluates the adequacy, usefulness and completeness of TestNForce.Software Computer TechnologyElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc