Title
Generating refactoring proposals to remove clones from automated system tests
Abstract
Automated system tests often have many clones, which make them complex to understand and costly to maintain. Unfortunately, removing clones is challenging as there are numerous possibilities of how to refactor them to reuse components such as subroutines. Additionally, clones often overlap partly which makes it particularly difficult to decide which parts to extract. If done wrongly, reuse potential is not leveraged optimally and structures between tests and reuse components will become unnecessarily complex. We present a method to support test engineers in extracting overlapping clones. Using grammar inference algorithms, we generate a refactoring proposal that demonstrates test engineers how overlapping clones can be extracted. Furthermore, we visualize the generated refactoring proposal to make it easily understandable for test engineers. An industrial case study demonstrates that our approach helps test engineers to gain information of the reuse potential of test suites and guides them to perform refactorings.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/ICPC.2015.20
ICPC
Keywords
Field
DocType
Automated Testing, Test Clones, Refactoring
Programming language,Systems engineering,Subroutine,Reuse,Visualization,Computer science,Automation,Grammar inference,Code refactoring
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1092-8138
978-1-5386-0535-6
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
22
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Benedikt Hauptmann1879.13
Elmar Juergens274331.07
Volkmar Woinke300.34