Last updated on Monday, October 06, 2025
@inproceedings{Gobert2021CAiSE,
author = {Maxime Gobert and Csaba Nagy and Henrique Rocha and
Serge Demeyer and Anthony Cleve},
booktitle = {Proceedings {CAiSE 2021} (33rd International
Conference on Advanced Information Systems
Engineering)},
editor = {La Rosa, Marcello and Sadiq, Shazia and
Teniente, Ernest},
note = {Acceptance ratio: 33 / 172 = 19\%},
pages = {229--245},
publisher = {Springer International Publishing},
title = {Challenges and Perils of Testing Database
Manipulation Code},
year = {2021},
abstract = {Software testing enable 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 investigate the current
state-of-the-practice in testing database
manipulation code. We first analyse the code of 72
projects mined from Libraries.io to get an impression
of the test coverage for database code. We confirm
that the database is poorly tested: 46\% of the
projects did not cover with tests half of their
database access methods, and 33\% of the projects did
not cover the database code at all. To understand the
difficulties in testing database code, we analysed
532 questions on StackExchange sites and deduced a
taxonomy. We found that developers mostly look for
insights on general best practices to test database
access code. They also have more technical questions
related to DB handling, mocking, parallelisation or
framework/tool usage. This investigation lays the
basis for future research on improving database code
testing.},
annote = {internationalconference},
top = {A in CORE2020},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-79382-1_14},
}