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An Assessment of Test-Driven Reuse: Promises and Pitfalls

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7925))

Abstract

Test-driven reuse (TDR) proposes to find reusable source code through the provision of test cases describing the functionality of interest to a developer. Proponents claim that their TDR approaches work well. This paper presents the results of an experiment to evaluate the ability of state-of-the-art TDR tools to locate reusable source code for realistic tasks. We find that non-trivial functionality, like that needed in the daily tasks of developers, can largely not be retrieved by these approaches. We provide an analysis of the shortcomings and underlying problems in the existing approaches, and a discussion of potential solutions.

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© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Nurolahzade, M., Walker, R.J., Maurer, F. (2013). An Assessment of Test-Driven Reuse: Promises and Pitfalls. In: Favaro, J., Morisio, M. (eds) Safe and Secure Software Reuse. ICSR 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7925. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38977-1_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38977-1_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-38976-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-38977-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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