An Analysis of Test Co-Evolution on GitHub Software Projects

• Charles Miranda UFPI
• Guilherme Avelino UFPI
• Pedro Santos Neto UFPI
• Victor da Silva UFPI

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/vem.2021.17215

Abstract

The software systems evolve and the evolution requires modifications to its source code to make changes, such as bug fixes, performance improvements, or adding new features. Given the importance of testing to ensure software quality, source code modifications must be accompanied by test code changes and increments. However, testing and its co-evolution are often neglected in the development of software projects, which can result in greater effort and cost to maintain the project. In this work, through the analysis of a large dataset, consisting of the development history of 3,000 projects hosted on Github, we investigate how source code and test artifacts evolve. Through the application of clustering techniques, we identified five common test growth patterns. Additionally, when comparing data from repositories identified with co-evolution and without co-evolution, it was observed that the first ones present higher levels of contribution (commits, collaborators, and forks).

Keywords: Co-evolution, test, mining software repositories, GitHub

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