Reflecting the Adoption of Software Testing Research in Open-Source Projects

In the recent years, a lot of research has been done in the field of software testing. But, there exist few empirical studies which analyze, if results of software testing research are actually practiced in real software projects, why they are (not) practiced, and how this influences the quality of the project. Our proposed research project tries to close this gap by analyzing open-source software projects. We focus our work on a concept, which is well accepted and known in our community for a longer period of time: test levels. Hence, we propose a two step approach to tackle the problem. First, we want to determine if the concept of a unit is still up-to- date and propose alternatives otherwise. Furthermore, we aim to investigate, why developers think that the concept of a unit is (not) current. In the second step we intend to check, based on the unit definition determined in the first step, how many tests on the different levels exist for the investigated projects. Additionally, based on the results, we want to examine, why developers are (not) developing tests for a certain test level and how this influences the software quality of the project. Our initial study showed, that very few projects have unit tests, using the unit definition of the IEEE and ISTQB. Furthermore, it revealed that developers intend to write unit tests, but they fail to do so.