Towards automatically identifying the co‐change of production and test code

Abstract

AbstractIn software evolution, keeping the test code co‐change with the production code is important, because the outdated test code may not work and is ineffective in revealing faults in the production code. However, due to the tight development time, the production and test code may not be co‐changed immediately by developers. For example, we analysed the top 1003 popular Java projects on GitHub and found that nearly 9.3% of cases (i.e., 464,417) did not update their production and test code at the same time, that is, the production code is updated first, and then the test code is updated at intervals. The result indicates that much test code will not be updated in time. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, Jtup, to remind developers to co‐change the production code and test code in time. Specifically, we first define the co‐changed production and test code as a positive instance, while unchanged test code (i.e., production code changed and test code unchanged) as a negative instance. Then, we extract multidimensional features from the production code to characterize the possibility of their co‐change, including code change features, code complexity features, and code semantic features. Finally, several machine learning‐based methods are employed to identify the co‐changed production and test code. We conduct comprehensive experiments on 20 datasets, and the results show that the Accuracy, Precision, and Recall achieved by Jtup are 76.7%, 78.1%, and 77.4%, which outperforms the state‐of‐the‐art method.