Removing redundant statements in amplified test cases

Bachelor thesis (2021)

Authors

W. Oosterbroek Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

C.E. Brandt Software Engineering - EEMCS (supervisor 1)
A.E. Zaidman Software Engineering - EEMCS (supervisor 2)
Przemysław Pawełczak Embedded Systems - EEMCS (coach)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2021 Wessel Oosterbroek
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Published Date

30-06-2021

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

Amplified test cases created by DSpot and TestCube often contain unnecessary statements that impact the readability of the tests in question. As a part of the effort to make these amplified test cases more developer-friendly, we investigate (dynamic) slicing, taint analysis and static analysis as approaches to remove redundant statements. In addition, we evaluate a simple static analysis
approach that we implemented into DSpot. Our results show that the implemented approach works well: while being rudimentary, it is able to remove a significant portion of the redundant statements in the amplified test cases. A problem with removing redundant statements is the fact that it, at least for the approaches we discuss in this paper, will take a significant amount of time depending on the size and quality of the original tests. While the removal of the statements themselves is relatively fast, especially when using our implemented static analysis approach, verifying that the tests still work as intended through mutation testing is resource-intensive.