GTAC 2014: Beyond Coverage: What Lurks in Test Suites?

Patrick Lam (University of Waterloo) We all want "better" test suites. But what makes for a good test suite? Certainly, test suites ought to aim for good coverage, at least at the statement coverage level. To be useful, test suites should run quickly enough to provide timely feedback. This talk will investigate a number of other dimensions on which to evaluate test suites. The talk claims that better test suites are more maintainable, more usable (for instance, because they run faster, or use fewer resources), and have fewer unjustified failures. In this talk, I'll present and synthesize facts about 10 open-source test suites (from 8,000 to 246,000 lines of code) and evaluate how they are doing.