Enhancing developers’ awareness on test suites’ quality with test smell summaries

Abstract

This thesis work is a development and implementation of a part of the tool "TestSmellDescriber" which helps to improve software developers’ awareness on test suites’ quality. Producing and maintaining superior quality test suites is bug susceptible and time consuming, thus, a huge relevant part of effort and time is spent by software developers for writing and maintaining premium quality test suites, which accounts up to fifty percent of the complete software development costs. As, writing and retaining fine quality test suites is highly error prone and very often leads to introduction of test smells. In the recent empirical studies, it is reported that, presence of test smells affects and complexes both, the effectiveness of the software quality assurance and maintainability of the test code. This thesis work has improved the functionality of the tool "TestSmellDescriber" by automatically generating and augmenting test smells summaries as comments at suite and method level in the tests, thereby improving software developers’ awareness on test suites’ quality and it can also complement automated detection and removal of textual and structural smells.