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Artefact Relation Graphs for Unit Test Reuse Recommendation

White, R; Krinke, J; Barr, ET; Sarro, F; Ragkhitwetsagul, C; (2021) Artefact Relation Graphs for Unit Test Reuse Recommendation. In: 2021 14th IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST). (pp. pp. 137-147). IEEE: Porto de Galinhas, Brazil. Green open access

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Abstract

The reuse of artefacts is fundamental to software development and can reduce development cost and time as well as improve the quality of the output. For example, developers often create new tests from existing tests by copying and adapting them. However, reuse opportunities are often missed due to the cost of discovering suitable artefacts to reuse.Development artefacts form groups that have both internal connections between artefacts of the same type, and cross-group connections between artefacts of different types. When a pair of artefact groups are considered, the cross-group connections form a bipartite graph. This paper presents Rashid, an abstract framework to assist artefact reuse by predicting edges in these bipartite graphs. We instantiate Rashid with Relatest, an approach to assist developers to reuse tests. Relatest recommends existing tests that are closely related to a new function and can, therefore, be easily adapted to test the new function. Our evaluation finds that Relatest's recommendations result in an average 58% reduction in developer effort (measured in tokens), for 75% of functions, resulting in an overall saving of 43% of the effort required to create tests. A user study revealed that, on average, developers needed 10 minutes less to develop a test when given Relatest recommendations and all developers reported that the recommendations were useful.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: Artefact Relation Graphs for Unit Test Reuse Recommendation
Event: 2021 14th IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)
ISBN-13: 9781728168364
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1109/ICST49551.2021.00025
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICST49551.2021.00025
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: Software testing, code reuse, recommender systems
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Chemical Engineering
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10130213
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