EzUnit: A Framework for Associating Failed Unit Tests with Potential Programming Errors

Abstract

Unit testing is essential in the agile context. A unit test case written long ago may uncover an error introduced only recently, at a time at which awareness of the test and the requirement it expresses may have long vanished. Popular unit testing frameworks such as JUnit may then detect the error at little more cost than the run of a static program checker (compiler). However, unlike such checkers current unit testing frameworks can only detect the presence of errors, they cannot locate them. With EzUnit, we present an extension to the JUnit Eclipse plug-in that serves to narrow down error locations, and that marks these locations in the source code in very much the same way syntactic and typing errors are displayed. Because EzUnit is itself designed as a framework, it can be extended by algorithms further narrowing down error locations.