CISPA
Browse

Practical Test Dependency Detection

Download (262.15 kB)
conference contribution
posted on 2023-11-29, 18:08 authored by Alessio Gambi, Jonathan Bell, Andreas ZellerAndreas Zeller
Regression tests should consistently produce the same outcome when executed against the same version of the system under test. Recent studies, however, show a different picture: in many cases simply changing the order in which tests execute is enough to produce different test outcomes. These studies also identify the presence of dependencies between tests as one likely cause of this behavior. Test dependencies affect the quality of tests and of the correlated development activities, like regression test selection, prioritization, and parallelization, which assume that tests are independent. Therefore, developers must promptly identify and resolve problematic test dependencies. This paper presents PRADET, a novel approach for detecting problematic dependencies that is both effective and efficient. PRADET uses a systematic, data-driven process to detect problematic test dependencies significantly faster and more precisely than prior work. PRADET scales to analyze large projects with thousands of tests that existing tools cannot analyze in reasonable amount of time, and found 27 previously unknown dependencies.

History

Preferred Citation

Alessio Gambi, Jonathan Bell and Andreas Zeller. Practical Test Dependency Detection. In: International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST). 2018.

Primary Research Area

  • Empirical and Behavioral Security

Name of Conference

International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)

Legacy Posted Date

2018-02-14

Open Access Type

  • Green

BibTeX

@inproceedings{cispa_all_1495, title = "Practical Test Dependency Detection", author = "Gambi, Alessio and Bell, Jonathan and Zeller, Andreas", booktitle="{International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)}", year="2018", }

Usage metrics

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC