Practitioners' expectations on automated test generation
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Publication Date
9-2024
Abstract
Automated test generation can help developers craft high-quality software tests while mitigating the manual effort needed for writing test code. Despite significant research efforts in automated test generation for nearly 50 years, there is a lack of clarity about what practitioners expect from automated test generation tools and whether the existing research meets their needs. To address this issue, we follow a mixed-methods approach to gain insights into practitioners' expectations of automated test generation. We first conduct the qualitative analysis from semi-structured interviews with 13 professionals, followed by a quantitative survey of 339 practitioners from 46 countries across five continents. We then conduct a literature review of premier venue papers from 2022 to 2024 (in the last three years) and compare current research findings with practitioners' expectations. From this comparison, we outline future research directions for researchers to bridge the gap between automated test generation research and practitioners' expectations.
Keywords
Automated test generation, Practitioners' expectations
Discipline
Categorical Data Analysis | Numerical Analysis and Computation
Publication
Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2024) : Vienna, Austria, September 16-20
First Page
1618
Last Page
1630
Identifier
10.1145/3650212.3680386
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
City or Country
New York, USA
Citation
YU, Xiao; LIU, Lei; HU, Xing; KEUNG, Jacky; XIA, Xin; and LO, David.
Practitioners' expectations on automated test generation. (2024). Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2024) : Vienna, Austria, September 16-20. 1618-1630.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/9919
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/3650212.3680386
