Evolution of the Practice of Software Testing in Java Projects

Abstract

Software testing helps developers minimize bugs and errors in their code, improving the overall software quality. In 2013, Kochhar et al. analyzed 20,817 software projects in order to study how prevalent the practice of software testing is in open-source projects. They found that projects with more lines of code (LOC) and projects with more developers tend to have more test cases. Additionally, they found a weak positive correlation between the number of test cases and the number of bugs. Since the conclusions of a study might become irrelevant over time because of the latest practices in the relevant fields, in this paper, we investigate if these conclusions remain valid if we re-evaluate Kochhar et al.’s findings on the Java projects that were developed from 2012 to 2021. For evaluation, we use a random sample of 20,000 open-source Java projects each year. Our results show that Kochhar et al.’s conclusions regarding the projects with test cases having more LOC, the weak positive correlation between the number of test cases and authors, and the weak positive correlation between the number of test cases and bugs remain stable until 2021. Our study corroborates Kochhar et al.’s conclusions and helps developers refocus in light of the latest findings regarding the practice of software testing.