SCoTUAM: uma abordagem para seleção de componentes para testes unitários em Aplicações Móveis

Abstract

The unit test is the level of software testing by which individual parts of the source code are tested. Implementing this type of test brings some benefits such as reducing failures in existing resources, improving code structure, decrease side effects, and reducing fear of code change (Burke and Coyner, 2017). However, the test activity for mobile applications is time-consuming, causing some developers to choose not to create unit tests. Reduced time makes testing automation a necessity. In this context, this work proposes a plugin to assist developers in selecting components that have a greater value in relation to the cost x benefit of the unit test in mobile applications of the Android platform. To measure the value of cost and benefit of components, the following metrics were chosen: halstead effort (HE), future maintenance cost (FMC), code smells (CS), call frequency (CF), risk of failures (RF), market vulnerability (MV) and business value (BV). The proposed plugin has three main processes: (1) Extraction of static metrics; (2) Extraction of dynamic, market and business metrics; and (3) Execution of the genetic algorithm to select the components to be tested. The proposed plugin called SCoTUAM can be added to the development interface of the Android Studio IDE. In this work two empirical studies were carried out. In the first study, the purpose was to analyze the correlation of the metrics, where the result showed the possibility of using the combined FMC, CS, CF, RF, MV and BV metrics in a multiobjective solution. In the second study, the objective was to analyze the plugin’s effectiveness in selecting components with error compared to the manual selection performed by unit test specialists in Android mobile applications, where the result showed the feasibility of the proposal in assisting the developer in the selection of components for the unit test.