A Survey on How Test Flakiness Affects Developers and What Support They Need To Address It
Non-deterministically passing and failing test cases, so called flaky tests, have recently become a focus area of software engineering research. While this research focus has been met with some enthusiastic endorsement from industry, prior work nevertheless mostly studied flakiness using a code-centric approach by mining software repositories. What data extracted from software repositories cannot tell us, however, is how developers perceive flakiness: How prevalent is test flakiness in developers’ daily routine, how does it affect them, and most importantly: What do they want us researchers to do about it? To answer these questions we surveyed 335 professional software developers and testers in different domains. The survey respondents confirm that flaky tests are a common and serious problem, thus reinforcing ongoing research on flaky test detection. Developers are less worried about the computational costs caused by re-running tests, but more about the loss of trust in the test outcomes. Therefore, they would like to have IDE plugins to detect flaky code as well as better visualizations of the problem, particularly dashboards showing test outcomes over time; they also wish for more training and information on flakiness. These important aspects will require the attention of researchers as well as tool developers.
Wed 6 AprDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
16:45 - 18:00 | ICST Empirical StudyJournal-First Papers / Research Papers at Margaret Hamilton Chair(s): Mohammad Reza Mousavi King's College London | ||
16:45 15mTalk | An experimental and practical study on the equivalent mutant connection: An evolutionary approach Journal-First Papers Link to publication DOI | ||
17:00 15mTalk | A Qualitative Study on the Sources, Impacts, and Mitigation Strategies of Flaky Tests Research Papers Sarra Habchi University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Guillaume Haben University of Luxembourg, Mike Papadakis University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Maxime Cordy University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Yves Le Traon University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg Pre-print | ||
17:15 15mTalk | As Code Testing: Characterizing Test Quality in Open Source Ansible Development Research Papers Pre-print File Attached | ||
17:30 15mTalk | A Survey on How Test Flakiness Affects Developers and What Support They Need To Address It Research Papers Pre-print | ||
17:45 15mLive Q&A | Discussion and Q&A Research Papers |