Teixeira, T.S.R.; Silveira, F.F.; Guerra, E.M. Moving towards a Mutant-Based Testing Tool for Verifying Behavior Maintenance in Test Code Refactorings. Computers2023, 12, 230.
Teixeira, T.S.R.; Silveira, F.F.; Guerra, E.M. Moving towards a Mutant-Based Testing Tool for Verifying Behavior Maintenance in Test Code Refactorings. Computers 2023, 12, 230.
Teixeira, T.S.R.; Silveira, F.F.; Guerra, E.M. Moving towards a Mutant-Based Testing Tool for Verifying Behavior Maintenance in Test Code Refactorings. Computers2023, 12, 230.
Teixeira, T.S.R.; Silveira, F.F.; Guerra, E.M. Moving towards a Mutant-Based Testing Tool for Verifying Behavior Maintenance in Test Code Refactorings. Computers 2023, 12, 230.
Abstract
Evaluating mutation testing behavior can help decide whether refactoring successfully maintains the expected initial test results. Moreover, manually performing this analytical work is both time-consuming and prone to errors. This paper extends an approach to assess test code behavior and proposes a tool called MeteoR. This tool comprises an IDE plugin to detect issues that may arise during test code refactoring, reducing the effort required to perform evaluations. A preliminary assessment was conducted to validate the tool and ensure the proposed test code refactoring approach is adequate. By analyzing not only the mutation score but also the generated mutants in the pre- and post-refactoring process, results show that the approach is capable of checking whether the behavior of the mutants remains unchanged throughout the refactoring process. This proposal represents one more step toward the practice of test code refactoring. It can improve overall software quality, allowing developers and testers to safely refactor the test code in a scalable and automated way.
Keywords
software engineering; test code refactoring; test smells; mutation testing
Subject
Computer Science and Mathematics, Computer Science
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
