Test behaviour detection as a test refactoring safety

Abstract

When refactoring production code, software developers rely on an automated test suite as a safeguard. However, when refactoring the test suite itself, there is no such safeguard. Therefore, there is a need for tool support that can verify if a refactored test suite preserves its behaviour pre- and post-refactoring. In this work we present T-CORE (Test COde REfactoring tool); a tool that captures the behaviour of Java tests in the form of a Test Behaviour Tree. T-CORE allows developers to verify that the refactoring of a test suite has preserved the behaviour of the test.