Test smells are poor design decisions implemented in test code, which can have an impact on the effectiveness and maintainability of unit tests. Even though test smell detection tools exist, how to rank the severity of the detected smells is an open research topic. In this work, we aim at investigating the severity rating for four test smells and investigate their perceived impact on test suite maintainability by the developers. To accomplish this, we first analyzed some 1,500 open-source projects to elicit severity thresholds for commonly found test smells. Then, we conducted a study with developers to evaluate our thresholds. We found that (1) current detection rules for certain test smells are considered as too strict by the developers and (2) our newly defined severity thresholds are in line with the participants' perception of how test smells have an impact on the maintainability of a test suite. Preprint [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3744281], data and material [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3611111]. @en

Test smells can be found in test code using a variety of tools. In this paper, we present our integration of a test smell detection tool into Better Code Hub (BCH), an online environment for monitoring code quality and identifying problems in it. We extended BCH with test smell detection and observe how developers react to various instances of test smells. By integrating this detection into BCH, we gain access to a wide range of developers working on both open-source and commercial projects using their own code. We study whether developers consider these test smells important and what they do with them in future code changes. From our preliminary results, we found out a high test smell detection accuracy for most test smells; however, developers are only willing to remove a small portion of them.

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