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Towards automatic scenario generation from coverage information

Published: 18 May 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Nowadays, the design of software systems is pushed towards agile development practices. One of its most fundamental approaches is Test Driven Development (TDD). This procedure is based on test cases which are incrementally written prior to the implementation. Recently, Behavior Driven Development (BDD) has been introduced as an extension of TDD, in which natural language scenarios are the starting point for the test cases. This description offers a ubiquitous communication mean for both the software developers and stakeholders.
Following the BDD methodology thoroughly, one would expect 100% code coverage, since code is only written to make the test cases pass. However, as we show in an empirical study this expectation is not valid in practice. It becomes even worse in the process of development, i.e. the coverage decreases over time. To close the coverage gap, we sketch an algorithm that generates BDD-style scenarios based on uncovered code.

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cover image ACM Conferences
AST '13: Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Automation of Software Test
May 2013
155 pages
ISBN:9781467361613

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IEEE Press

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Published: 18 May 2013

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ICSE '13: 35th International Conference on Software Engineering
May 18 - 19, 2013
California, San Francisco

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