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Automated Clone Elimination in Python Tests

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Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Software Engineering Methodologies (ISoLA 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 15222))

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Abstract

Code clones are a well-known software quality metric with existing tools for detection and (semi-) automated elimination for common programming languages. While they are usually eliminated by extracting duplicate code into shared methods/functions, we are here looking in particular at Python code for test cases, where clones stem from repeated test cases with primarily different arguments and expected results. In this scenario, the ideal solution is not introducing shared code, but rather using parametrized tests from the unit testing framework.

We combine an existing clone detector (NiCad) with our own code transformation that eliminates code clones in Python test cases using the pytest framework. We show the usefulness of our approach by surveying open source Python projects that can benefit from our refactoring and evaluate the performance and correctness of our transformation by comparing unit-test results before and after.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The source code for PyTeRor can be found at https://github.com/semaki2000/PyTeRor and is archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11145543; also see [8].

  2. 2.

    See our support request in https://txl.ca/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1148.

  3. 3.

    xpassed tests are passing tests which were expected to fail (xfail).

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This paper is partially supported by the CroFlow project: Enabling Highly Automated Cross-Organisational Workflow Planning (grant no. 326249).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Sebastian Kingston & Volker Stolz

  2. Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway

    Violet Ka I Pun & Volker Stolz

Authors
  1. Sebastian Kingston
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  2. Violet Ka I Pun
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Correspondence to Violet Ka I Pun .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Limerick, CSIS and Lero, Limerick, Ireland

    Tiziana Margaria

  2. TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany

    Bernhard Steffen

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Kingston, S., I Pun, V.K., Stolz, V. (2025). Automated Clone Elimination in Python Tests. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Software Engineering Methodologies. ISoLA 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15222. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-75387-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-75387-9_7

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