An Approach and Benchmark to Detect Behavioral Changes of Commits in Continuous Integration
This addresses the need for automated detection of behavioral changes in software development, but it is incremental as it builds on existing test suites and has limitations in scope.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting behavioral changes in commits during continuous integration by proposing DCI, an approach that generates test methods through assertion amplification and input space exploration, and it evaluates on a curated dataset of 60 commits from 6 Java projects, finding that DCI works on 15.29% of commits.
When a developer pushes a change to an application's codebase, a good practice is to have a test case specifying this behavioral change. Thanks to continuous integration (CI), the test is run on subsequent commits to check that they do no introduce a regression for that behavior. In this paper, we propose an approach that detects behavioral changes in commits. As input, it takes a program, its test suite, and a commit. Its output is a set of test methods that capture the behavioral difference between the pre-commit and post-commit versions of the program. We call our approach DCI (Detecting behavioral changes in CI). It works by generating variations of the existing test cases through (i) assertion amplification and (ii) a search-based exploration of the input space. We evaluate our approach on a curated set of 60 commits from 6 open source Java projects. To our knowledge, this is the first ever curated dataset of real-world behavioral changes. Our evaluation shows that DCI is able to generate test methods that detect behavioral changes. Our approach is fully automated and can be integrated into current development processes. The main limitations are that it targets unit tests and works on a relatively small fraction of commits. More specifically, DCI works on commits that have a unit test that already executes the modified code. In practice, from our benchmark projects, we found 15.29% of commits to meet the conditions required by DCI.