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“Automatic test factoring for Java” by David Saff, Shay Artzi, Jeff H. Perkins, and Michael D. Ernst. In ASE 2005: Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, (Long Beach, CA, USA), Nov. 2005, pp. 114-123.
Test factoring creates fast, focused unit tests from slow system-wide tests; each new unit test exercises only a subset of the functionality exercised by the system test. Augmenting a test suite with factored unit tests should catch errors earlier in a test run.
One way to factor a test is to introduce mock objects. If a test exercises a component T, which interacts with another component E (the “environment”), the implementation of E can be replaced by a mock. The mock checks that T's calls to E are as expected, and it simulates E's behavior in response. We introduce an automatic technique for test factoring. Given a system test for T and E, and a record of T's and E's behavior when the system test is run, test factoring generates unit tests for T in which E is mocked. The factored tests can isolate bugs in T from bugs in E and, if E is slow or expensive, improve test performance or cost.
Our implementation of automatic dynamic test factoring for the Java language reduces the running time of a system test suite by up to an order of magnitude.
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BibTeX entry:
@inproceedings{SaffAPE2005,
author = {David Saff and Shay Artzi and Jeff H. Perkins and Michael D.
Ernst},
title = {Automatic test factoring for {Java}},
booktitle = {ASE 2005: Proceedings of the 20th Annual International
Conference on Automated Software Engineering},
pages = {114--123},
address = {Long Beach, CA, USA},
month = nov,
year = {2005}
}