Characterizing the Relative Significance of a Test Smell

Authors:
Bart Van Rompaey;Bart Du Bois;Serge Demeyer
Affiliations:
University Of Antwerp;University Of Antwerp;University Of Antwerp
Venue:
ICSM '06 Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance
Year:
2006

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Abstract

Test code, just like any other code we write, erodes when frequently changed. As such, refactoring, which has been shown to impact maintainability and comprehensibility, can be part of a solution to counter this erosion. We propose a metric-based heuristical approach, which allows to rank occurrences of so-called test smells (i.e. symptoms of poorly designed tests) according to their relative significance. This ranking can subsequently be used to start refactoring. Through an open-source case study, ArgoUML, we demonstrate that we are able to identify those test cases who violate unit test criteria.