An automatic refactoring framework for replacing test-production inheritance by mocking mechanism

Abstract

Unit testing focuses on verifying the functions of individual units of a software system. It is challenging due to the high inter-dependencies among software units. Developers address this by mocking-replacing the dependency by a faked object. Despite the existence of powerful, dedicated mocking frameworks, developers often turn to a hand-rolled approach-inheritance. That is, they create a subclass of the dependent class and mock its behavior through method overriding. However, this requires tedious implementation and compromises the design quality of unit tests. This work contributes a fully automated refactoring framework to identify and replace the usage of inheritance by using Mockito-a well received mocking framework. Our approach is built upon the empirical experience from five open source projects that use inheritance for mocking. We evaluate our approach on four other projects. Results show that our framework is efficient, generally applicable to new datasets, mostly preserves test case behaviors in detecting defects (in the form of mutants), and decouples test code from production code. The qualitative evaluation by experienced developers suggests that the auto-refactoring solutions generated by our framework improve the quality of the unit test cases in various aspects, such as making test conditions more explicit, as well as improved cohesion, readability, understandability, and maintainability with test cases.