Investigating Developers' Contributions to Test Smell Survivability: A Study of Open-Source Projects
Resumo
Open-source software (OSS) projects rely on core and peripheral developers to develop, release, and maintain software. The former group plays a crucial role in initiating the project and making key decisions, while the latter contributes less frequently and has little decision-making power. Prior studies have explored the relationship between developer experience and test code quality. However, there is limited empirical evidence regarding the survivability of test smells during software evolution and maintenance. In this study, we investigate the relationship between developers’ experience and the survivability of test smells during test case refactorings in OSS projects. We empirically studied four OSS Java projects, in which we identified test smells using manual and automated approaches and analyzed the authorship of the insertion and removal of test smells. Our findings reveal that test smells are commonly inserted during class creation, and 10.39% of them are removed between 366 and 2,911 days. While peripheral developers remove more test smells, core developers remove different types of test smells.
