TY - GEN
T1 - The co-evolution of test maintenance and code maintenance through the lens of fine-grained semantic changes
AU - Levin, Stanislav
AU - Yehudai, Amiram
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 IEEE.
PY - 2017/11/2
Y1 - 2017/11/2
N2 - Automatic testing is a widely adopted technique for improving software quality. Software developers add, remove and update test methods and test classes as part of the software development process as well as during the evolution phase, following the initial release. In this work we conduct a large scale study of 61 popular open source projects and report the relationships we have established between test maintenance, production code maintenance, and semantic changes (e.g, statement added, method removed, etc.). performed in developers' commits. We build predictive models, and show that the number of tests in a software project can be well predicted by employing code maintenance profiles (i.e., how many commits were performed in each of the maintenance activities: corrective, perfective, adaptive). Our findings also reveal that more often than not, developers perform code fixes without performing complementary test maintenance in the same commit (e.g., update an existing test or add a new one). When developers do perform test maintenance, it is likely to be affected by the semantic changes they perform as part of their commit. Our work is based on studying 61 popular open source projects, comprised of over 240, 000 commits consisting of over 16, 000, 000 semantic change type instances, performed by over 4, 000 software engineers.
AB - Automatic testing is a widely adopted technique for improving software quality. Software developers add, remove and update test methods and test classes as part of the software development process as well as during the evolution phase, following the initial release. In this work we conduct a large scale study of 61 popular open source projects and report the relationships we have established between test maintenance, production code maintenance, and semantic changes (e.g, statement added, method removed, etc.). performed in developers' commits. We build predictive models, and show that the number of tests in a software project can be well predicted by employing code maintenance profiles (i.e., how many commits were performed in each of the maintenance activities: corrective, perfective, adaptive). Our findings also reveal that more often than not, developers perform code fixes without performing complementary test maintenance in the same commit (e.g., update an existing test or add a new one). When developers do perform test maintenance, it is likely to be affected by the semantic changes they perform as part of their commit. Our work is based on studying 61 popular open source projects, comprised of over 240, 000 commits consisting of over 16, 000, 000 semantic change type instances, performed by over 4, 000 software engineers.
KW - Human factors
KW - Mining software repositories
KW - Predictive models
KW - Software maintenance
KW - Software metrics
KW - Software testing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85040605526&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICSME.2017.9
DO - 10.1109/ICSME.2017.9
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AN - SCOPUS:85040605526
T3 - Proceedings - 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2017
SP - 35
EP - 46
BT - Proceedings - 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2017
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2017
Y2 - 19 September 2017 through 22 September 2017
ER -