Comparison of Test Groups Based on Behavior and Package Hierarchy

Abstract

Data collected from the software and the development process is usually part of some kind of underlying structure, hence they could be organized into groups or clusters. This is true of the test cases. There are several concepts for creating groups, one approach is that the tests are grouped by their location, another approach is that they are categorized based on their behavior. For unit tests, ideally, these two approaches would give the same result. However this is not true in reality! In our empirical study the difference between the two concepts (on Java systems) was examined, also the behaviour groups based on coverage and the location-groups based on package hierarchy were analyzed. Groups containing tests were examined as well. In addition the difference between package-based groups and behavior-based groups based on coverage matrix was explored. To quantify the results, empirical experiments were performed and the differences were identified with the metrics used in the literature.