SHF: Small: Assisting Developers in the Creation and Maintenance of Unit Tests

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To test software, developers must perform two activities: testcreation and test maintenance. The first activity, test creation,consists of developing and implementing a test suite---the set oftests that will be used to evaluate the software. The secondactivity, test maintenance, consists of both understanding existingtest cases and evolving them in response to changes in the applicationthat is being tested. Despite decades of work, both of theseactivities are still expensive and labor-intensive. In this project,we will address the need for useful developer support for both testcreation and test maintenance by investigating and buildingcooperative approaches where automated tools and developers worktogether, each focusing on their respective strengths. Improving theefficiency and effectiveness of both testing activities will bebeneficial in reducing the overall cost of software development and,at the same time, improving software quality.This project will contribute to the state of the art by (1) innovatingin the areas of program analysis and natural-language program analysisand (2) synergistically integrating these two strands of innovations.First, the PIs will investigate cooperative approaches for generating unittests based on developer intent to save developer's time and to lowerthe cognitive barrier for writing tests by automating the tediousaspects of test creation. Second, the PIs will investigate techniques forimproving the comprehensibility of existing tests by automaticallygenerating various forms of test documentation including descriptivetest method names and both summary and explanatory comments. Finally,the PIs will quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate and refine the newlydeveloped techniques to ensure that they are both useful andeffective. The tools and experimental infrastructure developed withinthe project will be released, which will let researchers andpractitioners build on the project's results.