Serge Demeyer | Publications | E-mail Feedback
Last updated on Thursday, November 16, 2023
@article{Gobert2023InformationSystems,
author = {Maxime Gobert and Csaba Nagy and Henrique Rocha and
Serge Demeyer and Anthony Cleve},
journal = {Information Systems},
month = jan,
pages = {102105},
title = {Best practices of testing database manipulation code},
volume = {111},
year = {2023},
abstract = {Software testing enables development teams to
maintain the quality of a software system while it
evolves. The database manipulation code requires
special attention in this context. However, it is
often neglected and suffers from software maintenance
problems. In this paper, we study the current
state-of-the-practice in testing database
manipulation code. We first analysed the tests of 72
open-source projects to gain insight into the
coverage of database access code. The database was
poorly tested: 46\% of the projects did not cover
with tests half of their database access methods, and
33\% did not cover the database code at all. This
poor coverage motivated us to study developers’
challenges and best practices. (i) First, we analysed
532 questions on Stack Exchange sites and deduced a
taxonomy of issues. Developers mostly looked for
general best practices to test database access code.
Their technical questions were related to database
management, mocking, parallelisation, or
framework/tool usage. (ii) Next, we examined the
answers to these questions. We manually labelled 598
answers to 255 questions. We distinguished 363
solutions and organised them in a taxonomy of best
practices. Most of the suggestions considered the
testing environment and recommended various tools or
configurations. The second largest category was
database management, where many addressed database
initialisation and clean-up between tests. Other
categories pertained to code structure or design,
concepts, performance, processes, test
characteristics, test code, and mocking. We
illustrate the two taxonomies through intriguing
examples.},
annote = {internationaljournal},
doi = {10.1016/j.is.2022.102105},
issn = {0306-4379},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/
S0306437922000886},
}