Masters Thesis on False Positives in Test Failures

[Kevin van den Bekerom <k....@sig.eu>]

Dear Developers of the Apache Jackrabbit project,



My name is Kevin van den Bekerom and I am currently doing my Master's
research on the topic of false alarms in test code. I would like to ask the
input of the Jackrabbit development team categorizing test code bugs.



My research is based on a recent paper by Arash et al. (
http://salt.ece.ubc.ca/publications/docs/icsme15.pdf). They conducted an
empirical study, categorizing "test code bugs" in Apache software projects,
e.g. semantic, flaky, environmental, etc. A "test code bug" is a failing
test, where the System Under Test is correct, but the test code is
incorrect. To identify test code bugs they looked at issues in JIRA, and
checked if the fixing commit was only in the test code. Only fixed issues
were counted and categorised.



My goal is to replicate their results using a different approach, i.e. ask
developers that were involved in the issue and/or fix how they
would categorise it.  For the Jackrabbit project they counted 145 test code
bugs. Insight into false positives can therefore be very relevant for your
project. Note that the authors only sampled a number of identified test
code bugs for individual inspection.


I would like to ask the Jackrabbit team’s participation in categorizing the
various test bugs. I will provide a list of JIRA IDs which are identified
as test code bugs and an initial list of categories (assertion fault,
obsolete assertion, test dependency, etc) to aid in
the categorisation process with short explanations. In my belief, the
developers that worked on the issue are the one's that are most capable of
categorizing the issue. Please let me know if this project looks
interesting to you and if you are willing to help me out.



As a next step I will look for common patterns in identified test code bugs
and my aim is to extent static source code analysis techniques to be also
suited to find test code bugs. I am of course very happy to share my
findings with the team.



Hope to hear from you!



With kind regards,

-- 
*Kevin van den Bekerom* | Intern

+31 6 21 33 93 85 | kvandenbekerom@sig.eu
Software Improvement Group | www.sig.eu