Tool Support for Change-Centric Test Development

Current development tools for unit testing help automate test execution, report results, and generate test stubs, but they offer no aid in designing tests aimed specifically at the effects of changes to a program. This article describes a method for applying change impact analysis to test-driven development, thereby providing developers with quantitative feedback from test coverage on their changes. They can then use this information to meet defined coverage goals or to help generate new tests to reveal unanticipated change effects. The authors' approach, called change-centric test development, is tool supported; a typical scenario shows the effectiveness of their tool JUnitMX in a practical feasibility study.