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An Exploratory Study of the State of Practice of Performance Testing in Java-Based Open Source Projects

Authors:

Philipp Leitner,

Cor-Paul BezemerAuthors Info & Claims

ICPE '17: Proceedings of the 8th ACM/SPEC on International Conference on Performance Engineering

Pages 373 - 384

https://doi.org/10.1145/3030207.3030213

Published: 17 April 2017 Publication History

Abstract

The usage of open source (OS) software is wide-spread across many industries. While the functional quality of OS projects is considered to be similar to closed-source software, much is unknown about the quality in terms of performance. One challenge for OS developers is that, unlike for functional testing, there is a lack of accepted best practices for performance testing. To reveal the state of practice of performance testing in OS projects, we conduct an exploratory study on 111 Java-based OS projects from GitHub. We study the performance tests of these projects from five perspectives: (1) developers, (2) size, (3) test organization, (4) types of performance tests and (5) used tooling. We show that writing performance tests is not a popular task in OS projects: performance tests form only a small portion of the test suite, are rarely updated, and are usually maintained by a small group of core project developers. Further, even though many projects are aware that they need performance tests, developers appear to struggle implementing them. We argue that future performance testing frameworks should provider better support for low-friction testing, for instance via non-parameterized methods or performance test generation, as well as focus on a tight integration with standard continuous integration tooling.

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Cited By

Traini LDi Menna FCortellessa VFilkov VRay BZhou M(2024)AI-driven Java Performance Testing: Balancing Result Quality with Testing TimeProceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3691620.3695017(443-454)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3691620.3695017
Imran MCortellessa VDi Ruscio DRubei RTraini L(2024)An Empirical Study on Code Coverage of Performance TestingProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3661167.3661196(48-57)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3661167.3661196
Laaber CYue TAli S(2024)Evaluating Search-Based Software Microbenchmark PrioritizationIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.338083650:7(1687-1703)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2024.3380836
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Index Terms

An Exploratory Study of the State of Practice of Performance Testing in Java-Based Open Source Projects
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Performance

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICPE '17: Proceedings of the 8th ACM/SPEC on International Conference on Performance Engineering

April 2017

450 pages

ISBN:9781450344043

DOI:10.1145/3030207

General Chairs:
Walter Binder
Università della Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland
,
Vittorio Cortellessa
Università dell'Aquila, Italy
,
Program Chairs:
Anne Koziolek
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
,
Evgenia Smirni
College of William & Mary, USA
,
Meikel Poess
Oracle Corporation, USA

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGMETRICS: ACM Special Interest Group on Measurement and Evaluation
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
SPEC: SPEC Research Group

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 April 2017

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Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

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ICPE '17

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ICPE '17: ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering

April 22 - 26, 2017

L'Aquila, Italy

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ICPE '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 27 of 83 submissions, 33%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 252 of 851 submissions, 30%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3691620.3695017
Imran MCortellessa VDi Ruscio DRubei RTraini L(2024)An Empirical Study on Code Coverage of Performance TestingProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3661167.3661196(48-57)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3661167.3661196
Laaber CYue TAli S(2024)Evaluating Search-Based Software Microbenchmark PrioritizationIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.338083650:7(1687-1703)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2024.3380836
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Trubiani CPinciroli RBiaggi AFontana F(2023)Automated Detection of Software Performance Antipatterns in Java-Based ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.323432149:4(2873-2891)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
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