Using Association Rules to Study the Co-evolution of Production & Test Code

Using Association Rules to Study the Co-evolution of Production & Test Code

Lubsen, Z.
Zaidman, A.
Pinzger, M.

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Software Computer Technology

2009-12-31

Paper accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 6th International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2009). Unit tests are generally acknowledged as an important aid to produce high quality code, as they provide quick feedback to developers on the correctness of their code. In order to achieve high quality, well-maintained tests are needed. Ideally, tests co-evolve with the production code to test changes as soon as possible. In this paper, we explore an approach based on association rule mining to determine whether production and test code co-evolve synchronously. Through two case studies, one with an open source and another one with an industrial software system, we show that our association rule mining approach allows one to assess the co-evolution of product and test code in a software project and, moreover, to uncover the distribution of programmer effort over pure coding, pure testing, or a more test-driven-like practice.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:0bc86607-68ef-48a9-9902-d4f3933d220b

Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group

1872-5392

Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2009-015

https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR.2009.5069493

Institutional Repository

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(c) 2009 by the authors of this report. Software Engineering Research Group, Department of
Software Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology. All rights reserved. No part of this series may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the authors.