An Empirical Study of Adoption of Software Testing in Open Source Projects

Pavneet Singh Kochhar1, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé2, David Lo1,
Lingxiao Jiang1
1Singapore Management University
2University of Luxembourg

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Importance of Software Testing
Functionality -- Requirements
Debugging -- Software complexity
Costs -- $59 billions* for inadequate testing
What is the adoption of test cases
In open-source projects?
*G. Tassey, “The economic impacts of inadequate infrastructure for software
testing,” National Institute of Standards and Technology, RTI Project, 2002.

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Objective & Contributions
Popularity of test cases
Presence of test cases – project characteristics
Influence of software development artifacts
Large Scale Study on over 20,000 GitHub projects

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Dataset & Statistical computations
Downloaded over 100,000 projects from GitHub
Randomly selected 50,000 projects
 Preliminary study
Filter out projects with < 500 Lines of Code (LOC)
 20,817 projects

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Dataset & Statistical computations
Lines of code
LOC* – By programming languages
Number of test cases
Count of test files
Developer contributions
Project team size
 Bug count
Tags
 Bug reporters
User names
*SLOCCount (http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/)

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RQ1– Popularity of Test Cases
Projects % of Projects
Without Test Cases 38.34%
With Test Cases 61.65%
84.87% of the projects < 100 test cases
10.7% of the projects have >100 & < 500 cases
4.4% of the projects >500 test cases
Distribution of Test Cases

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Box Plot
Median
Lower
Quartile
Upper
Quartile
Lower
Whisker
(25% of Data)
Upper
Whisker
(25% of Data)
Outliers
50% of
Data

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LOC (Projects with & without Test cases)
Difference between the distributions is statistically significan
(p-value < 0.05)

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LOC & Test Cases
Positive correlation between #LOC and #Test Cases (ρ=0.427)
(p-value < 0.05)

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LOC & Test cases/LOC
Negative correlation between #LOC and #Test Cases/LOC (ρ=-0.451)
(p-value < 0.05)

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RQ2– Developers & Test Cases
Developers (Projects with & without Test cases)
Difference between the distributions is statistically significant
(p-value < 0.05)

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Developers & Test cases
Weak correlation between #Developers and #Test Cases (ρ=0.207)
(p-value < 0.05)

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Developers & Test cases/developer
Negative correlation between Team size and #Test Cases per developer (ρ=-0.444)
(p-value < 0.05)

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RQ3–Bug Count and Test Cases
Identifying bugs (Tags)
bug bug; T bug; Bug Confirmed; bugs; starter
bug; bug fix etc.
defect defect; Type-Defect; minor defect
error error; Wow error; build error; error page;
user error etc.

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RQ3–Bug Count and Test Cases
Test cases & Bugs
Weak correlation between # bugs and #Test Cases (ρ=0.181)
(p-value < 0.05)

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RQ4–Bug Reporters and Test Cases
Bug reporters (Projects with & without Test cases)
Difference between the distributions is statistically significant
(p-value < 0.05)

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RQ4– Bug Reporters and Test Cases
Test cases & Bug reporters
Weak correlation between # bug reporters and #Test Cases (ρ=0.171)
(p-value < 0.05)

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RQ5–Programming Languages and Test Cases
Projects (Top 10 Languages)
1. Java
2. Ruby
3. PHP
4. Python
5. ANSI C
6. C++
7. Objective-C
8. C#
9. JavaScript
10.Perl

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Test Cases/Project (Top 10 Languages)
Language # of Projects # of Test Cases Test Cases/ Project
C++ 1,920 648,773 337.90
ANSI C 2,197 286,009 130.18
PHP 2,902 255,553 88.06
C# 1,042 81,334 78.05
Java 3,112 196,703 63.20
Ruby 3,016 173,864 57.64
JavaScript 819 39,070 47.70
Python 2,536 103,600 40.85
Objective-C 1,153 21,343 18.51
Perl 630 7,690 12.20

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Test Cases (Median) (Top 10 Languages)

Distribution of test cases (C++)
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Threats to Validity
Heuristics to detect test cases
Counting bugs
 Tags: bug, error, defect
 Not all projects use GitHub’s issue tracking
system

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Conclusion
Findings:
o Projects with test cases are bigger in size.
o # of test cases per LOC decreases with increasing LOC.
o The more developers, the more test cases
o The more developers, the less ratio of test cases/developer
o Weak correlation between # of test cases and # of bugs
o # of test cases and # of bug reporters have weak positive correlation
o Projects written in popular languages such as C++, ANSI C & PHP
have higher mean numbers of test cases.
Future agenda:
-- Exploration of the influence of more project characteristics/metrics
-- Check with other open source datasets
-- Use language specific heuristics

Bug Tags
27
installation rich Improvement Reporting
duplicated pat New feature community
feature mark Confirmed documentation
routing needs review In Progress categorization
optimization Samples
Feature
request
publishing
security
Unable to
reproduce
Wont fix ranker
translations nack Resolved server
ui rich Bug confirmed Fatal
TODO pat backend Build System
low priority mark low-priority MS AspNet
Sam presentation frontend OAuth2

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C++ test cases
URL Language
# of test
cases
https://github.com/isis-project/WebKit cpp 166,488
https://github.com/cswei/Olympia_on_Desktop cpp 94,591
https://github.com/librelab/qtmoko-test cpp 52,039
https://github.com/mozilla/mozilla-central cpp 36,671
https://github.com/weissms/owb-mirror cpp 29,340

Distribution of test cases (C#)
29

30
Test Cases (Top 10 Languages)
Median
Lower
Quartile
Upper
Quartile
Lower
whisker
Upper
Whisker Outliers
50% of
Data

An Empirical Study of Adoption of Software Testing in Open Source Projects

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