Testes de design: uma abordagem baseada em testes para verificação automática de conformidade estrutural entre implementação e regras de design.

Abstract

Assuring that a program conforms to its specification is a key concern in software quality assurance. Although there is substantial tool support to check whether an implementation complies to its functional requirements, checking whether it conforms to its design remains as an almost completely manual activity. We propose the concept of design tests, which are test-like programs that automatically check whether an implementation conforms to a specific design rule. Design rules are implemented directly in the target programming language in the form of tests. As a proof of concept, we present DesignWizard, an library developed to support design tests for Java programs as JUnit test cases. We have performed an evaluation to show that DesignWizard’s API is easy to use and the tool scales as software grows. To achieve this, we have conducted an experiment to assess the usability of DesignWizard’s API by analysing eleven developers on the activity of composing five design tests using DesignWizard’s API. Besides that, we have measured the time and memory consumption that DesignWizard takes to apply static analysis on several projects sizes varying between 0.125MB and 46MB. The results of our study show that the time and memory consumption of static analysis performed by Design Wizard has a linear form as the size of the application grows. Besides that, the experiment conducted with the programmers leads us to conclude that DesignWizard’s API is easy to use in the sense that it meets to programmers expectations.