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“Automatic mock object creation for test factoring” by David Saff and Michael D. Ernst. In PASTE 2004: ACM SIGPLAN/SIGSOFT Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering (PASTE'04), (Washington, DC, USA), June 2004, pp. 49-51.
Test factoring creates fast, focused unit tests from slow system-wide tests; each new unit test exercises only a subset of the functionality exercised by the system tests. Augmenting a test suite with factored unit tests, and prioritizing the tests, should catch errors earlier in a test run.
One way to factor a test is to introduce mock objects. If a test exercises a component A, which is designed to issue queries against or mutate another component B, the implementation of B can be replaced by a mock. The mock has two purposes: it checks that A's calls to B are as expected, and it simulates B's behavior in response. Given a system test for A and B, and a record of A's and B's behavior when the system test is run, we would like to automatically generate unit tests for A in which B is mocked. The factored tests can isolate bugs in A from bugs in B and, if B is slow or expensive, improve test performance or cost.
This paper motivates test factoring with an illustrative example, proposes a simple procedure for automatically generating mock objects for factored tests, and gives examples of how the procedure can be extended to larger change languages.
Download: PDF, slides (PDF), slides (PowerPoint).
BibTeX entry:
@inproceedings{SaffE2004:mock-creation,
author = {David Saff and Michael D. Ernst},
title = {Automatic mock object creation for test factoring},
booktitle = {PASTE 2004: ACM SIGPLAN/SIGSOFT Workshop on Program
Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering (PASTE'04)},
pages = {49--51},
address = {Washington, DC, USA},
month = jun,
year = {2004}
}
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