Artefact Relation Graphs for Unit Test Reuse Recommendation

Abstract

The reuse of artefacts is fundamental to software development and can reduce development cost and time as well as improve the quality of the output. For example, developers often create new tests from existing tests by copying and adapting them. However, reuse opportunities are often missed due to the cost of discovering suitable artefacts to reuse.Development artefacts form groups that have both internal connections between artefacts of the same type, and cross-group connections between artefacts of different types. When a pair of artefact groups are considered, the cross-group connections form a bipartite graph. This paper presents Rashid, an abstract framework to assist artefact reuse by predicting edges in these bipartite graphs. We instantiate Rashid with Relatest, an approach to assist developers to reuse tests. Relatest recommends existing tests that are closely related to a new function and can, therefore, be easily adapted to test the new function. Our evaluation finds that Relatest's recommendations result in an average 58% reduction in developer effort (measured in tokens), for 75% of functions, resulting in an overall saving of 43% of the effort required to create tests. A user study revealed that, on average, developers needed 10 minutes less to develop a test when given Relatest recommendations and all developers reported that the recommendations were useful.