Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > How Good Are My Tests?

Electronic data

  • FullText (1)

    Rights statement: ©2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

    Accepted author manuscript, 129 KB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Links

Text available via DOI:

View graph of relations

How Good Are My Tests?

Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSNConference contribution/Paperpeer-review

Published

Standard

How Good Are My Tests? / Bowes, David; Hall, Tracy; Petrić, Jean et al.
2017 IEEE/ACM 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM). IEEE Computer Society, 2017. p. 9-14 7968009 (2017 IEEE/ACM 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM)).

Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSNConference contribution/Paperpeer-review

Harvard

Bowes, D, Hall, T, Petrić, J, Shippey, T & Turhan, B 2017, How Good Are My Tests? in 2017 IEEE/ACM 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM)., 7968009, 2017 IEEE/ACM 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM), IEEE Computer Society, pp. 9-14, 8th IEEE/ACM Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics, WETSoM 2017, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 23/05/17. https://doi.org/10.1109/WETSoM.2017.2

APA

Bowes, D., Hall, T., Petrić, J., Shippey, T., & Turhan, B. (2017). How Good Are My Tests? In 2017 IEEE/ACM 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM) (pp. 9-14). Article 7968009 (2017 IEEE/ACM 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM)). IEEE Computer Society. https://doi.org/10.1109/WETSoM.2017.2

Vancouver

Bowes D, Hall T, Petrić J, Shippey T, Turhan B. How Good Are My Tests? In 2017 IEEE/ACM 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM). IEEE Computer Society. 2017. p. 9-14. 7968009. (2017 IEEE/ACM 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM)). doi: 10.1109/WETSoM.2017.2

Author

Bowes, David ; Hall, Tracy ; Petrić, Jean et al. / How Good Are My Tests?. 2017 IEEE/ACM 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM). IEEE Computer Society, 2017. pp. 9-14 (2017 IEEE/ACM 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM)).

Bibtex

@inproceedings{a6a03f63b9e04978a47460a0e7a8ecc7,
title = "How Good Are My Tests?",
abstract = "Background: Test quality is a prerequisite for achieving production system quality. While the concept of quality is multidimensional, most of the effort in testing context hasbeen channelled towards measuring test effectiveness. Objective: While effectiveness of tests is certainly important, we aim to identify a core list of testing principles that also address other quality facets of testing, and to discuss how they can be quantified as indicators of test quality. Method: We have conducted a two-day workshop with our industry partners to come up with a list of relevant principles and best practices expected to result in high quality tests. We then utilised our academic and industrial training materials together with recommendations in practitioner oriented testing books to refine the list. We surveyed existing literature for potential metrics to quantify identified principles. Results: We have identified a list of 15 testing principles to capture the essence of testing goals and best practices from quality perspective. Eight principles do not map toexisting test smells and we propose metrics for six of those. Further, we have identified additional potential metrics for the seven principles that partially map to test smells. Conclusion: We provide a core list of testing principles along with a discussion of possible ways to quantify them for assessing goodness of tests. We believe that our work would be useful for practitioners in assessing the quality of their tests from multiple perspectives including but not limited to maintainability, comprehension and simplicity.",
keywords = "metrics, test quality, unit testing",
author = "David Bowes and Tracy Hall and Jean Petri{\'c} and Thomas Shippey and Burak Turhan",
note = "{\textcopyright}2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.; 8th IEEE/ACM Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics, WETSoM 2017 ; Conference date: 23-05-2017",
year = "2017",
month = jul,
day = "3",
doi = "10.1109/WETSoM.2017.2",
language = "English",
series = "2017 IEEE/ACM 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM)",
publisher = "IEEE Computer Society",
pages = "9--14",
booktitle = "2017 IEEE/ACM 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM)",

}

RIS

TY - GEN

T1 - How Good Are My Tests?

AU - Bowes, David

AU - Hall, Tracy

AU - Petrić, Jean

AU - Shippey, Thomas

AU - Turhan, Burak

N1 - ©2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

PY - 2017/7/3

Y1 - 2017/7/3

N2 - Background: Test quality is a prerequisite for achieving production system quality. While the concept of quality is multidimensional, most of the effort in testing context hasbeen channelled towards measuring test effectiveness. Objective: While effectiveness of tests is certainly important, we aim to identify a core list of testing principles that also address other quality facets of testing, and to discuss how they can be quantified as indicators of test quality. Method: We have conducted a two-day workshop with our industry partners to come up with a list of relevant principles and best practices expected to result in high quality tests. We then utilised our academic and industrial training materials together with recommendations in practitioner oriented testing books to refine the list. We surveyed existing literature for potential metrics to quantify identified principles. Results: We have identified a list of 15 testing principles to capture the essence of testing goals and best practices from quality perspective. Eight principles do not map toexisting test smells and we propose metrics for six of those. Further, we have identified additional potential metrics for the seven principles that partially map to test smells. Conclusion: We provide a core list of testing principles along with a discussion of possible ways to quantify them for assessing goodness of tests. We believe that our work would be useful for practitioners in assessing the quality of their tests from multiple perspectives including but not limited to maintainability, comprehension and simplicity.

AB - Background: Test quality is a prerequisite for achieving production system quality. While the concept of quality is multidimensional, most of the effort in testing context hasbeen channelled towards measuring test effectiveness. Objective: While effectiveness of tests is certainly important, we aim to identify a core list of testing principles that also address other quality facets of testing, and to discuss how they can be quantified as indicators of test quality. Method: We have conducted a two-day workshop with our industry partners to come up with a list of relevant principles and best practices expected to result in high quality tests. We then utilised our academic and industrial training materials together with recommendations in practitioner oriented testing books to refine the list. We surveyed existing literature for potential metrics to quantify identified principles. Results: We have identified a list of 15 testing principles to capture the essence of testing goals and best practices from quality perspective. Eight principles do not map toexisting test smells and we propose metrics for six of those. Further, we have identified additional potential metrics for the seven principles that partially map to test smells. Conclusion: We provide a core list of testing principles along with a discussion of possible ways to quantify them for assessing goodness of tests. We believe that our work would be useful for practitioners in assessing the quality of their tests from multiple perspectives including but not limited to maintainability, comprehension and simplicity.

KW - metrics

KW - test quality

KW - unit testing

U2 - 10.1109/WETSoM.2017.2

DO - 10.1109/WETSoM.2017.2

M3 - Conference contribution/Paper

AN - SCOPUS:85026860594

T3 - 2017 IEEE/ACM 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM)

SP - 9

EP - 14

BT - 2017 IEEE/ACM 8th Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM)

PB - IEEE Computer Society

T2 - 8th IEEE/ACM Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics, WETSoM 2017

Y2 - 23 May 2017

ER -