Empirical Analysis of Object-Oriented Software Test Suite Evolution

The software system is evolving over the time, thus, the test suite must be repaired according to the changing code. Updating test cases manually is a time-consuming activity, especially for large test suites, which motivate the recent development of automatically repairing test techniques. To develop an effective automatic repair technique that reduces the effort of development and the cost of evolution, the developer should understand how the test suite evolves in practice. This investigation aims to conduct a comprehensive empirical study on eight Java systems with many versions of these systems and their test suites to find out how the test suite is evolving, and to find the relationship between the change in the program and the corresponding evolution in the test suite. This study showed that the test suite size is mostly increased, where the test suite complexity is stabilized. The increase (or decrease) in the code size will mostly increase (or decrease) the test suite size. However, the increasing or decreasing in the code complexity is offset by stabilizing the test suite complexity. Moreover, the percentage of the code coverage tends to be increased more than decreased, but in the mutation coverage, the opposite is true.

@article{Alsolami2019,
  title     = {Empirical Analysis of Object-Oriented Software Test Suite Evolution},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {10},
  number    = {11},
  year      = {2019},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Nada Alsolami and Qasem Obeidat and Mamdouh Alenezi},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0101113},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0101113}
}