Software Unit Test Smells

Introduction

Unit test code, just like regular/production source code, is subject to bad programming practices, known also as anti-patterns, defects and smells [1]. Smells, being symptoms of bad design or implementation decisions, has been proven to be responsible for decreasing the quality of software systems from various aspects, such as making it harder to understand, more complex to maintain, and more prone to errors and bugs [2].

Test smells are defined as bad programming practices in unit test code (such as how test cases are organized, implemented and interact with each other) that indicate potential design problems in the test source code [3], [4], [5], [6].

The objective of this project is to educate developers on the types of unit testing smells that developers typically introduce or encounter when writing unit tests. To this extent, this site provides definitions (along with examples) of unit test smells and an open-source tool to detect the different smell types in the source code.

Tool Demonstration

Test Smell Types

Test Smell Examples

Test Smell Detector

Test Smell Research

Research Data, Exloratory Studies, etc.

Test Smell Publications

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References

[1] Fowler, M., & Beck, K. (1999). Refactoring: improving the design of existing code. Addison-Wesley Professional.

[2] Mäntylä, M. V., & Lassenius, C. (2006). Subjective evaluation of software evolvability using code smells: An empirical study. Empirical Software Engineering, 11(3), 395-431.

[3] Van Deursen, A., Moonen, L., van den Bergh, A., & Kok, G. (2001, May). Refactoring test code. In Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on extreme programming and flexible processes in software engineering (XP2001) (pp. 92-95).

[4] Greiler, M., Zaidman, A., Deursen, A. V., & Storey, M. A. (2013, May). Strategies for avoiding text fixture smells during software evolution. In Proceedings of the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (pp. 387-396). IEEE Press.

[5] Palomba, F., Di Nucci, D., Panichella, A., Oliveto, R., & De Lucia, A. (2016, May). On the diffusion of test smells in automatically generated test code: An empirical study. In Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Search-Based Software Testing (pp. 5-14). ACM.

[6] Meszaros, G. (2007). xUnit test patterns: Refactoring test code. Pearson Education.