We have inspected the test code for the scala.collection.Iterator trait for potential systematic maintainability enhancements. Test spies are stub objects for later verification of interactions with those objects in a testing scenario. According to our preliminary findings, using a mocking framework that supports the automatic generation of test spies, such as Mockito, can lead to a significant improvement of test code in terms of size (in some cases over 70% smaller), readability, and conveying intent by expressing expectations through a declarative domain-specific language. We argue that the resulting test code is not only more maintainable but also a better stylistic match for the Scala community than manually implemented, explicitly stateful test spies.
Article
Auto-generated Spies Increase Test Maintainability
ArXiv
Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
8-29-2018
Disciplines
Abstract
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
Citation Information
Konstantin Läufer, John O'Sullivan, and George K. Thiruvathukal, Auto-generated Spies Increase Test Maintainability, arXiv:1808.09630
Submitted to ACM SIGPLAN Scala 2018