Efficient unit test case minimization
- ASE 2007
by
Andreas Leitner, Manuel Oriol, Andreas Zeller, Ilinca Ciupa, Bertrand Meyer
Proceedings of the twenty-second IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering, Pages 417-420, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, November 2007.
Digital Library via DOI: 10.1145/1321631.1321698
Abstract
Randomized unit test cases can be very effective in detecting defects. In practice, however, failing test cases often comprise long sequences of method calls that are tiresome to reproduce and debug. We present a combination of static slicing and delta debugging that automatically minimizes the sequence of failure-inducing method calls. In a case study on the EiffelBase library, the strategy minimizes failing unit test cases on average by 96%.
This approach improves on the state of the art by being far more efficient: in contrast to the approach of Lei and Andrews, who use delta debugging alone, our case study found slicing to be 50 times faster, while providing comparable results. The combination of slicing and delta debugging gives the best results and is 11 times faster.
BibTeX Entry
@inproceedings{leitner-ase-2008,
title = "Efficient unit test case minimization",
author = "Andreas Leitner and Manuel Oriol and Andreas Zeller and Ilinca Ciupa and Bertrand Meyer",
year = "2007",
month = nov,
address = "Atlanta, Georgia, USA",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the twenty-second IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering",
pages = "417--420",
doi = "10.1145/1321631.1321698",
}