Categories and Patterns of Java Program Unit Test Code Bugs

Hansol Choe, Shin Hong

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2019.46.4.341

Since unit testing is widely used in many software projects, the threat of unit test bugs(i.e., bugs in the test case code) is becoming a more important issue of software quality assurance. Test code bugs are critical threats because they may invalidate the quality assurance process, which consequently hurts quality of products and performance of the project. This paper presents a set of test bug categories and a set of bug patterns extracted from real-world cases. Unlike the existing work on test code bugs, this paper suggests a classification method to systematically categorize different features of test code bugs (i.e., structures, operations, and requirements). In addition, this paper defines eight new bug patterns in unit test code, based on previous bug reports from well-known open-source projects. Each pattern is formally specified as source code patterns so that it can be used for to construct a static bug pattern checker.