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A test case refactoring approach for pattern-based software development

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Abstract

In the current trend, Extreme Programing methodology is widely adopted by small and medium-sized projects for dealing with rapidly or indefinite changing requirements. Test-first strategy and code refactoring are the important practices of Extreme Programing for rapid development and quality support. The test-first strategy emphasizes that test cases are designed before system implementation to keep the correctness of artifacts during software development; whereas refactoring is the removal of “bad smell” code for improving quality without changing its semantics. However, the test-first strategy may conflict with code refactoring in the sense that the original test cases may be broken or inefficient for testing programs, which are revised by code refactoring. In general, the developers revise the test cases manually since it is not complicated. However, when the developers perform a pattern-based refactoring to improve the quality, the effort of revising the test cases is much more than that in simple code refactoring. In our observation, a pattern-based refactoring is composed of many simple and atomic code refactorings. If we have the composition relationship and the mapping rules between code refactoring and test case refactoring, we may infer a test case revision guideline in pattern-based refactoring. Based on this idea, in this research, we propose a four-phase approach to guide the construction of the test case refactoring for design patterns. We also introduce our approach by using some well-known design patterns and evaluate its feasibility by means of test coverage.

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Notes

  1. The Apache Ant Project, http://ant.apache.org/

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Acknowledgments

This research was sponsored by Department of Industrial Technology, Ministry of Economic Affairs in Taiwan ROC under the Grant NSC98-2220-E-035-003. We would also like to thank deeply the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and feedbacks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan

    Peng-Hua Chu, Nien-Lin Hsueh & Hong-Hsiang Chen

  2. Computer Science and Information Engineering Department, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei, Taiwan

    Chien-Hung Liu

Authors
  1. Peng-Hua Chu
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  2. Nien-Lin Hsueh
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  3. Hong-Hsiang Chen
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  4. Chien-Hung Liu
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Correspondence to Peng-Hua Chu.

Appendix

Appendix

See Figs. 22, 23 and 24.

Fig. 22
figure 22

P: The whole code of original MazeGame

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Fig. 23
figure 23

\(T^\prime\): The whole code of revised test cases for MazeGame

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Fig. 24
figure 24

\(P^\prime\): The whole code of revised class MazeGame

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Chu, PH., Hsueh, NL., Chen, HH. et al. A test case refactoring approach for pattern-based software development. Software Qual J 20, 43–75 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-011-9143-x

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