Production Monitoring to Improve Test Suites

In this article, we propose to use production executions to improve the quality of testing for certain methods of interest for developers. These methods can be methods that are not covered by the existing test suite or methods that are poorly tested. We devise an approach called
pankti
which monitors applications as they execute in production and then automatically generates differential unit tests, as well as derived oracles, from the collected data.
pankti
’s monitoring and generation focuses on one single programming language, Java. We evaluate it on three real-world, open-source projects: a videoconferencing system, a PDF manipulation library, and an e-commerce application. We show that
pankti
is able to generate differential unit tests by monitoring target methods in production and that the generated tests improve the quality of the test suite of the application under consideration.