Interaction-Based Tracking of Program Entities for Test Case Evolution
Hoan Anh Nguyen, Tung Thanh Nguyen, Tien N. Nguyen, Hung Viet Nguyen · 2017
After changes are made to a system, developers typically perform regression testing to uncover the regression faults in previously existing functionality of the system. However, during software evolution, the program entities (i.e., classes/methods) realizing such functionality might be modified/replaced by other entities. Thus, in the new version, existing test cases containing obsolete class references or method calls might be broken or might not test the intended functionality. To repair the broken method calls in those test cases, for each obsolete class/method, a tester needs to find the corresponding entity that provides the same/similar function or has the same role in the new version. To automate that task, we present ITRACK, a novel tool for matching program entities across versions, which mainly relies on their interactions in the code. The key idea is that the role and functionality of an entity correlate with its interactions with other entities (e.g., how it uses or is used by others). Two entities in two versions are matched based on the similarity of their interactions with other entities in the respective versions via our novel iterative matching algorithm. Our empirical evaluation shows that ITRACK achieves from 84-99% accuracy in identifying the calls in previous test cases that need to be adapted in accordance with the replacements of entities and provide such matching to support repairing broken method calls.