Automatic test factoring for java

  • Authors:

  • David Saff;Shay Artzi;Jeff H. Perkins;Michael D. Ernst

  • Affiliations:

  • MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Cambridge, MA;MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Cambridge, MA;MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Cambridge, MA;MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM international Conference on Automated software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Test factoring creates fast, focused unit tests from slow system-wide tests; each new unit test exercises only a subset of the functionality exercised by the system test. Augmenting a test suite with factored unit tests should catch errors earlier in a test run.One way to factor a test is to introduce mock objects. If a test exercises a component T, which interacts with another component E (the "environment"), the implementation of E can be replaced by a mock. The mock checks that T's calls to E are as expected, and it simulates E's behavior in response. We introduce an automatic technique for test factoring. Given a system test for T and E, and a record of T's and E's behavior when the system test is run, test factoring generates unit tests for T in which E is mocked. The factored tests can isolate bugs in T from bugs in E and, if E is slow or expensive, improve test performance or cost.Our implementation of automatic dynamic test factoring for the Java language reduces the running time of a system test suite by up to an order of magnitude.