The impact of co-evolution of code production and test suites through software releases in open source software systems

Abstract

The software system evolves and changes with the time, so the test suite must be maintained according to code changes. Maintaining test cases manually is an expensive and time-consuming activity, especially for large test suites, which has motivated the recent development of automated test-repair techniques. Several researchers indicate that software evolution shows a direct impact on test suites evolution, as they have strong relationships and they should be evolved concurrently. This article aims to provide statistical evidence of having this significant relationship between the code production and its associated test suites. Seven systems along with releases are collected and eight metrics were calculated to be used in this study. The result shows how the systems under study are evolving and have a high impact on their test suites, although two metrics provide a negative significant relationship.