Leandro Sales, Saurabh Sinha, and Alessandro Orso

Politecnico di Milano, Italy; IBM Research, India; Georgia Tech, USA

Track: Formal Tool Demonstrations
Session: Formal Demonstrations 1
Test suites, just like the applications they are testing, evolve throughout their lifetime. One of the main reasons for test-suite evolution is test obsolescence: test cases cease to work because of changes in the code and must be suitably repaired. There are several reasons why it is important to achieve a thorough understanding of how test cases evolve in practice. In particular, researchers who investigate automated test repair--an increasingly active research area--can use such understanding to develop more effective repair techniques that can be successfully applied in real-world scenarios. More generally, analyzing test-suite evolution can help testers better understand how test cases are modified during maintenance and improve the test evolution process, an extremely time consuming activity for any non-trivial test suite. Unfortunately, there are no existing tools that facilitate investigation of test evolution. To tackle this problem, we developed TestEvol, a tool that enables the systematic study of test-suite evolution for Java programs and JUnit test cases. This demonstration presents TestEvol and illustrates its usefulness and practical applicability by showing how TestEvol can be successfully used on real-world software and test suites. Demo video at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~orso/software/testevol/