On the Diffusion of Test Smells in Automatically Generated Test Code: An Empirical Study

The role of software testing in the software development process is widely recognized as a key activity for successful projects. This is the reason why in the last decade several automatic unit test generation tools have been proposed, focusing particularly on high code coverage. Despite the effort spent by the research community, there is still a lack of empirical investigation aimed at analyzing the characteristics of the produced test code. Indeed, while some studies inspected the effectiveness and the usability of these tools in practice, it is still unknown whether test code is maintainable. In this paper, we conducted a large scale empirical study in order to analyze the diffusion of bad design solutions, namely test smells, in automatically generated unit test classes. Results of the study show the high diffusion of test smells as well as the frequent co-occurrence of different types of design problems. Finally we found that all test smells have strong positive correlation with structural characteristics of the systems such as size or number of classes.