Studying Co-evolution of Production and Test Code Using Association Rule Mining

Studying Co-evolution of Production and Test Code Using Association Rule Mining

Lubsen, Z.A.

Zaidman, A.E. (mentor)

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Software Technology

Software Engineering

2008-07-03

Unit testing is generally accepted as an aid to produce high quality code, and can provide quick feedback to developers on the quality of the software. To have a high quality and well maintained test suite requires the production and test code to synchronously co-evolve, as added or changed production code should be tested as soon as possible. Traditionally the quality of a test suite is measured using code coverage, but this measurement does not provide insight in how tests are used by developers. In this thesis we explore a new approach to analyse how tests in a system are used based on association rules mined from the system’s change history. The approach is based on the reasoning that an association rule between two entities, possibly of a different type, is a measure for the co-use of the entities. Case studies show that analysing all the resulting rules allows us to uncover the distribution of programmer effort over pure coding, pure testing, or a more test-driven practice. Another application of our approach is that we can express the number of tests that are truly co-evolving with their associated production class.

software testing
co-evolution
software maintenance
datamining

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:2edcbb82-6649-454e-8195-129055a0b13d

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2008 Lubsen, Z.A.