An empirical study on the influence of developers’ experience on software test code quality

Abstract

Software developers’ engagement in open-source software projects lies in different levels of participation, e.g., core or peripheral developers. Recent studies have investigated the role of developers’ contributions and their influence on software quality. However, few studies investigate the relationship between the developers’ experience and test code quality in software projects. In this study, we aim to investigate the relationship between the developers’ experience and the test code quality from the perspective of test smells. We performed an empirical study to analyze the insertion and removal of test smells in four open-source Java projects. We collected 18 test smells and calculated their authorship through the projects’ Tags. The four software projects, we analyze 386 test classes and 5,178 test smells. We found out that the insertion of 67.28% of test smells occurs during the test class creation, and the removal of 20.88% of test smells occurs during the evolution of projects. In addition, core developers are responsible for inserting 88.91% and removing 89.82% test smells. Core developers insert and remove more test smells than the peripheral developers. Most test smell removal is due to test code deletion, which may indicate that both core and peripheral developers are unaware of test smells in test code.