Paper Info
Title
A test-to-code traceability method using .NET custom attributes
Abstract
According to the fact that unit tests are valuable sources of up-to-date documentation, maintaining traceability links between unit tests and production code can be helpful for software engineers to perceive parts of a system. Traceability information facilitates the testing and debugging of complex software by linking the dependencies between code and tests. Researchers have proposed various approaches in order to recover test-to-code traceability links. However, results from applying these approaches are not satisfactory due to low accuracy and manual effort required by a domain expert to verify recovered links. This paper further identifies the problems of existing test-to-code traceability recovery approaches and proposes a new method, called Embedding test-to-code Traceability links into Unit tests via a Custom Attribute (ETUCA).This method establishes traceability links between unit tests and production code with minimal effort required from unit-test developers. ETUCA introduces a .NET custom attribute which acts as a direct and explicit traceability link to be incorporated into every unit test during the unit-test development process for recording the traceability information. Empirical results indicate that, compared to manual tracing, ETUCA notably reduces the time taken for tracing test units in relation to production code. Moreover, it would be able to recover all traceability links, given test developers correctly embedded custom attributes in the development phase.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2811411.2811553
RACS
Field
DocType
Citations 
Software engineering,Computer science,Unit testing,Traceability matrix,Real-time computing,Software,Traceability,Tracing,Reverse semantic traceability,Requirements traceability,Debugging
Conference
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
22
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Azadeh Rafati110.35
Sai Peck Lee214222.55
Reza Meimandi Parizi326429.36
Sima Zamani4302.23