Abstract
The impact of developers' experience on several development practices has been widely investigated in the past. One of the most promising research fields is software testing, as many researchers found significant correlations between developers' experience and testing effectiveness. In this paper, we aim at further studying this relation, by focusing on how development teams' experience is associated with the assertion density, i.e., the number of assertions per test class KLOC, that has previously been shown as an effective way to decrease fault density. We perform a mixed-methods empirical study. First, we devise a statistical model relating development teams' experience and other control factors to the assertion density of test classes belonging to 12 software projects. This model enables us to investigate whether experience comes out as a statistically significant factor to explain assertion density. Second, we contrast the statistical findings with a survey study conducted with 57 developers, who were asked their opinions on how developer's experience is related to the way they add assertions in test code. Our findings suggest the existence of a relationship: On the one hand, the development team's experience is a statistically significant factor in most of the systems that we have investigated; on the other hand, developers confirm the importance of experience and team composition for the effective testing of production code.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2019 |
| Publisher | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) |
| Pages | 223-234 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781728130941 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2019 |
| Event | 2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2019 - Cleveland, United States Duration: 30 Sept 2019 → 4 Oct 2019 https://icsme2019.github.io |
Publication series
| Name | Proceedings - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2019 |
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Conference
| Conference | 2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2019 |
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| Abbreviated title | ICSME 2019 |
| Country/Territory | United States |
| City | Cleveland |
| Period | 30/09/19 → 4/10/19 |
| Internet address |
Bibliographical note
Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-careOtherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.
Keywords
- Assertion Density
- Developers' Experience
- Mixed Methods Empirical Study