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Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings Yes
Title On the Relation of Test Smells to Software Code Quality
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Davide Spadini
  • Fabio Palomba
  • Andy Zaidman
  • Magiel Bruntink
  • Alberto Bacchelli
Presentation Type paper
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
ISBN 978-1-5386-7870-1
Page Range 1 - 12
Event Title 2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)
Event Type conference
Event Location Madrid
Event Start Date October 23 - 2018
Event End Date October 29 - 2018
Place of Publication USA
Publisher IEEE
Abstract Text Test smells are sub-optimal design choices in the implementation of test code. As reported by recent studies, their presence might not only negatively affect the comprehension of test suites but can also lead to test cases being less effective in finding bugs in production code. Although significant steps toward understanding test smells, there is still a notable absence of studies assessing their association with software quality. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the presence of test smells and the change-and defect-proneness of test code, as well as the defect-proneness of the tested production code. To this aim, we collect data on 221 releases of ten software systems and we analyze more than a million test cases to investigate the association of six test smells and their co-occurrence with software quality. Key results of our study include:(i) tests with smells are more change-and defect-prone, (ii) "Indirect Testing", "Eager Test", and "Assertion Roulette" are the most significant smells for change-proneness and, (iii) production code is more defect-prone when tested by smelly tests.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ICSME.2018.00010
Other Identification Number merlin-id:20235
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