SHF: Small: Assisting Developers in the Creation and Maintenance of Unit Tests

University Of Delaware, Newark DE

Investigators

Abstract

To test software, developers must perform two activities: test creation and test maintenance. The first activity, test creation, consists of developing and implementing a test suite---the set of tests that will be used to evaluate the software. The second activity, test maintenance, consists of both understanding existing test cases and evolving them in response to changes in the application that is being tested. Despite decades of work, both of these activities are still expensive and labor-intensive. In this project, we will address the need for useful developer support for both test creation and test maintenance by investigating and building cooperative approaches where automated tools and developers work together, each focusing on their respective strengths. Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of both testing activities will be beneficial in reducing the overall cost of software development and, at the same time, improving software quality. This project will contribute to the state of the art by (1) innovating in the areas of program analysis and natural-language program analysis and (2) synergistically integrating these two strands of innovations. First, the PIs will investigate cooperative approaches for generating unit tests based on developer intent to save developer's time and to lower the cognitive barrier for writing tests by automating the tedious aspects of test creation. Second, the PIs will investigate techniques for improving the comprehensibility of existing tests by automatically generating various forms of test documentation including descriptive test method names and both summary and explanatory comments. Finally, the PIs will quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate and refine the newly developed techniques to ensure that they are both useful and effective. The tools and experimental infrastructure developed within the project will be released, which will let researchers and practitioners build on the project's results.