Using Evolutionary Coupling to Establish Relevance Links Between Tests and Code Units. A case study on fault localization

Understand

Many software engineering techniques, such as fault localization, operate based on relevance relationships between tests and code.

• These relationships are often inferred through the use of dynamic test execution information (test execution traces) that approximate the link between relevant code units and asserted, by the tests, program behaviour.
• Unfortunately, in practice dynamic information is not always available due to the overheads introduced by the instrumentation or the nature of the production environments.
• To deal with this issue, we propose CEMENT, a static technique that automatically infers such test and code relationships given the projects' evolution.