In Search of What We Experimentally Know about Unit Testing

Gathering evidence in any discipline is a lengthy procedure, requiring experimentation and empirical confirmation to transform information from mere opinion to undisputed fact. Software engineering is a relatively young field and experimental SE is even younger, so undisputed facts are few and far between. Nevertheless, ESE's relevance is growing because experimental results can help practitioners make better decisions. We have aggregated results from unit-testing experiments with the aim of identifying information with some experimental basis that might help practitioners make decisions. Most of the experiments focus on two important characteristics of testing techniques: effectiveness and efficiency. Some other experiments study the quality of test-case sets according to different criteria