Automatically repairing test cases for evolving method declarations

Abstract

When software systems evolve, for example due to fault fixes, modification of functionalities or refactoring activities, test cases may become obsolete thus generating wrong results or even not being executable or compilable. Maintaining test cases is expensive and time consuming, and often test cases are discarded by software developers due to high maintenance costs. This paper presents TestCareAssistant, a technique that combines data-flow analysis with program diffing for automatically repairing test cases that become obsolete because of changes in method declarations (addition, removal, or type modification of parameters or return values). The paper illustrates the efficacy of TestCareAssistant by analyzing the impact of method declarations changes on the executability of test cases, and by presenting the preliminary results of applying TestCareAssistant to repair 22 test cases.