short-paper

Just-In-Time Test Smell Detection and Refactoring: The DARTS Project

Authors:

Fabio PalombaAuthors Info & Claims

ICPC '20: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension

Pages 441 - 445

https://doi.org/10.1145/3387904.3389296

Published: 12 September 2020 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

Test smells represent sub-optimal design or implementation solutions applied when developing test cases. Previous research has shown that these smells may decrease both maintainability and effectiveness of tests and, as such, researchers have been devising methods to automatically detect them. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of tools that developers can use within their integrated development environment to identify test smells and refactor them. In this paper, we present DARTS (Detection And Refactoring of Test Smells), an Intellij plug-in which (1) implements a state-of-the-art detection mechanism to detect instances of three test smell types, i.e., General Fixture, Eager Test, and Lack of Cohesion of Test Methods, at commit-level and (2) enables their automated refactoring through the integrated APIs provided by Intellij.

References

[1]

Gabriele Bavota, Abdallah Qusef, Rocco Oliveto, Andrea De Lucia, and Dave Binkley. 2015. Are test smells really harmful? An empirical study. Empirical Software Engineering 20, 4 (2015), 1052--1094.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[2]

Boris Beizer. 2003. Software testing techniques. Dreamtech Press.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[3]

Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. 1993. Design patterns: Abstraction and reuse of object-oriented design. In European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming. Springer, 406--431.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

Giovanni Grano, Fabio Palomba, Dario Di Nucci, Andrea De Lucia, and Harald C Gall. 2019. Scented since the beginning: On the diffuseness of test smells in automatically generated test code. Journal of Systems and Software 156 (2019), 312--327.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[5]

Michaela Greiler, Arie Van Deursen, and Margaret-Anne Storey. 2013. Automated detection of test fixture strategies and smells. In Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST). 322--331.

Google Scholar

[6]

Gerard Meszaros. 2007. xUnit test patterns: Refactoring test code. Pearson Education.

Google Scholar

[7]

Fabio Palomba, Dario Di Nucci, Michele Tufano, Gabriele Bavota, Rocco Oliveto, Denys Poshyvanyk, and Andrea De Lucia. 2015. Landfill: An open dataset of code smells with public evaluation. In 2015 IEEE/ACM 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories. IEEE, 482--485.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[8]

Fabio Palomba, Andy Zaidman, and Andrea De Lucia. 2018. Automatic test smell detection using information retrieval techniques. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME). IEEE, 311--322.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[9]

Davide Spadini, Fabio Palomba, Andy Zaidman, Magiel Bruntink, and Alberto Bacchelli. 2018. On the relation of test smells to software code quality. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME). IEEE, 1--12.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[10]

Arie Van Deursen, Leon Moonen, Alex van den Bergh, and Gerard Kok. 2001. Refactoring test code. In Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on extreme programming and flexible processes in software engineering (XP2001). 92--95.

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Soares ERibeiro MSantos A(2024)A Multimethod Study of Test Smells: Cataloging Removal and New TypesProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3701625.3701699(676-686)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3701625.3701699
Fasolino ATramontana PCoppola RArdito LFraser GLeotta M(2024)Test Smells Learning by a Gamification ApproachProceedings of the 3rd ACM International Workshop on Gamification in Software Development, Verification, and Validation10.1145/3678869.3685687(30-33)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3678869.3685687
Yang YHu XXia XYang X(2024)The Lost World: Characterizing and Detecting Undiscovered Test SmellsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/363197333:3(1-32)Online publication date: 15-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3631973
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Just-In-Time Test Smell Detection and Refactoring: The DARTS Project
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Software maintenance tools

Recommendations

Automated Detection of Test Fixture Strategies and Smells
ICST '13: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation

Designing automated tests is a challenging task. One important concern is how to design test fixtures, i.e. code that initializes and configures the system under test so that it is in an appropriate state for running particular automated tests. Test ...
Analyzing Test Smells Refactoring from a Developers Perspective
SBQS '22: Proceedings of the XXI Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality

Test smells represent a set of poorly designed tests, which can harm a test code’s maintenance and quality criteria. Although fundamental steps to understand test smells have been investigated, there is still an evident lack of studies evaluating the ...
The smell of fear: on the relation between test smells and flaky tests
Abstract
Regression testing is the activity performed by developers to check whether new modifications have not introduced bugs. A crucial requirement to make regression testing effective is that test cases are deterministic. Unfortunately, this is not ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

ICPC '20: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension

July 2020

481 pages

ISBN:9781450379588

DOI:10.1145/3387904

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 ACM 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]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 September 2020

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Short-paper
Research
Refereed limited

Funding Sources

Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

Conference

ICPC '20

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ICPC '20: 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension

July 13 - 15, 2020

Seoul, Republic of Korea

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

28
Total Citations
View Citations
317
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)40
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 31 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Soares ERibeiro MSantos A(2024)A Multimethod Study of Test Smells: Cataloging Removal and New TypesProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3701625.3701699(676-686)Online publication date: 5-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3701625.3701699
Fasolino ATramontana PCoppola RArdito LFraser GLeotta M(2024)Test Smells Learning by a Gamification ApproachProceedings of the 3rd ACM International Workshop on Gamification in Software Development, Verification, and Validation10.1145/3678869.3685687(30-33)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3678869.3685687
Yang YHu XXia XYang X(2024)The Lost World: Characterizing and Detecting Undiscovered Test SmellsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/363197333:3(1-32)Online publication date: 15-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3631973
Fushihara YAman HAmasaki SYokogawa TKawahara M(2024)Fault-Proneness of Python Programs Tested By Smelled Test Code2024 50th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)10.1109/SEAA64295.2024.00063(373-378)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SEAA64295.2024.00063
Li MFazzini M(2024)Automatically Removing Unnecessary Stubbings from Test Suites2024 IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)10.1109/ICST60714.2024.00029(233-244)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICST60714.2024.00029
Martins LGhaleb TCosta HMachado I(2024)A comprehensive catalog of refactoring strategies to handle test smells in Java-based systemsSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-024-09663-732:2(641-679)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11219-024-09663-7
Pontillo VAmoroso d’Aragona DPecorelli FDi Nucci DFerrucci FPalomba F(2024)Machine learning-based test smell detectionEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-023-10436-229:2Online publication date: 5-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10436-2
Pizzini AReinehr SMalucelli A(2023)Sentinel: A process for automatic removing of Test SmellsProceedings of the XXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3629479.3630019(80-89)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3629479.3630019
Soares ERibeiro MGheyi RAmaral GSantos A(2023)Refactoring Test Smells With JUnit 5: Why Should Developers Keep Up-to-Date?IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.317265449:3(1152-1170)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3172654
Fushihara YAman HAmasaki SYokogawa TKawahara M(2023)A Trend Analysis of Test Smells in Python Test Code Over Commit History2023 49th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)10.1109/SEAA60479.2023.00054(310-314)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/SEAA60479.2023.00054
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Automated Detection of Test Fixture Strategies and Smells

Analyzing Test Smells Refactoring from a Developers Perspective

The smell of fear: on the relation between test smells and flaky tests