Utilising code smells to detect quality problems in TTCN-3 test suites

Authors:
Helmut Neukirchen;Martin Bisanz
Affiliations:
Software Engineering for Distributed Systems Group, Institute for Informatics, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany;PRODYNA GmbH, Frankfurt, Germany
Venue:
TestCom'07/FATES'07 Proceedings of the 19th IFIP TC6/WG6.1 international conference, and 7th international conference on Testing of Software and Communicating Systems
Year:
2007

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Abstract

Today, test suites of several ten thousand lines of code are specified using the Testing and Test Control Notation (TTCN-3). Experience shows that the resulting test suites suffer from quality problems with respect to internal quality aspects like usability, maintainability, or reusability. Therefore, a quality assessment of TTCN-3 test suites is desirable. A powerful approach to detect quality problems in source code is the identification of code smells. Code smells are patterns of inappropriate language usage that is error-prone or may lead to quality problems. This paper presents a quality assessment approach for TTCN-3 test suites which is based on TTCN-3 code smells: To this aim, various TTCN-3 code smells have been identified and collected in a catalogue; the detection of instances of TTCN-3 code smells in test suites has been automated by a tool. The applicability of this approach is demonstrated by providing results from the quality assessment of several standardised TTCN-3 test suites.