Automatically Generating Test Templates from Test Names (N)

Abstract

Existing specification-based testing techniques require specifications that either do not exist or are too difficult to create. As a result, they often fall short of their goal of helping developers test expected behaviors. In this paper we present a novel, natural language-based approach that exploits the descriptive nature of test names to generate test templates. Similar to how modern IDEs simplify development by providing templates for common constructs such as loops, test templates can save time and lower the cognitive barrier for writing tests. The results of our evaluation show that the approach is feasible: despite the difficulty of the task, when test names contain a sufficient amount of information, the approach's accuracy is over 80% when parsing the relevant information from the test name and generating the template.