Increasing Unit Test Resilience бy Decreasing Pointcut Fragility

Abstract

By operating at a very detailed level, unit tests are very susceptible to changes in production code. Writing unit tests in aspect-oriented programming can help with their maintainability. However, the existing approaches do not take into account so-called pointcut fragility: a failure to address the intended join points due to small changes in the base code. An approach to increasing unit test resilience to changes in production code by decreasing pointcut fragility is proposed in this paper. The approach is implemented in AspectJ with JUnit used as a test oracle. The approach has been evaluated on several scenarios encompassing typical code modification that render unusable the tests written in a simple object-oriented way. The approach proposed in this paper managed to make the test resilient to the most of the changes introduced by these scenarios.

Selected Code-Quality Characteristics and Metrics for Internet of Things Systems

“…Unit test coverage and effectiveness (Section III-B5) is discussed as a relevant category for code quality, and a further detailed discussion can be conducted on the quality of the code of the created tests. As typical examples, unit tests code smells [91] and their fragility [92] can be expressed by metrics and further discussed. However, this field is outside the scope of our study.…”