Test confessions: a study of testing practices for plug-in systems
Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering
Measuring test case similarity to support test suite understanding
TOOLS'12 Proceedings of the 50th international conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns
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Plug-in architectures enable developers to build extensible software products. Such products are assembled from plug-ins, and their functionality can be enriched by adding or configuring plug-ins. The plug-ins themselves consist also of multiple plug-ins, and offer dedicated points through which their functionality can be influenced. A well-known example of such an architecture is Eclipse, best known for its use to create a series of extensible IDEs. In order to test systems built from plug-ins developers use extensive automated test suites. Unfortunately, current testing tools offer little insight in which of the many possible combinations of plug-ins and plug-in configurations are actually tested. To remedy this problem, we propose three architectural views that provide an extensibility perspective on plug-in-based systems and their test suites. The views combine static and dynamic information on plug-in dependencies, extension initialization, and extension usage. The views are implemented in ETSE, the Eclipse Plug-in Test Suite Exploration tool. We evaluate the proposed views by analyzing eGit and Mylyn, two open source Eclipse plug-ins.