Abstract:
Regression testing is one of the testing practices used by developers to ensure
that their program runs as expected. As the program evolves, it takes more
work and effort for developers to update and maintain a regression test suite.
Researchers have developed techniques to automate the generation of tests to
help reduce that workload. However, the generated tests are often semantically
meaningless and do not show the canonical usage of a class under test. In
this thesis, we propose AuMi-Tests, a novel technique that generates a regression
test suite for a given library by mining developer-written tests from open
source projects which use that library. This technique leverages the popularity
of open source development in the last decade. Because developers wrote
them, the tests from a test suite generated with our approach are likely to be semantically
meaningful. They will demonstrate real-world usage of the library
to its developers as well. We implemented our technique into a prototype tool
and tested it on 22 different subject libraries to evaluate its effectiveness. Our
findings showed that a test suite generated for a library through this technique
could complement the existing library tests and tests generated through stateof-
the-art automated test suite generators for that library to a certain degree.
