JTDog: a Gradle Plugin for Detecting Dynamic Test Smells

Abstract

The concept of the test smell represents potential problems with the readability and maintainability of the test code. Common test smells focus on static aspects of the source code, such as code length and complexity. These are easy to detect and do not cause problems in terms of test execution. On the other hand, dynamic smells, which are based on test runtime behavior, lead to misunderstanding of the test results. For example, they give developers the false impression that the test was passed without any problems, even though the test was poorly executed. Therefore, we should detect dynamic smells and take countermeasures as early as possible through the development. In this paper, we propose JTDog, a Gradle plugin for detecting dynamic smells. JTDog has high portability due to its integration into the build tool. We applied JTDog to 205 projects on GitHub and confirmed that the JTDog plugin has high portability. In addition, JTDog detected 1,117 dynamic smells in 66 projects.