@inproceedings{cc1d6f7796e3419e94dc0c5a2c60be3b,
title = "Does Unit-Tested Code Crash? A Case Study of Eclipse",
abstract = "Context: Software development projects increasingly adopt unit testing as a way to identify and correct program faults early in the construction process. Code that is unit tested should therefore have fewer failures associated with it. Objective: Compare the number of field failures arising in unit tested code against those arising in code that has not been unit tested. Method: We retrieved 2 083 979 crash incident reports associated with the Eclipse integrated development environment project, and processed them to obtain a set of 126 026 unique program failure stack traces associated with a specific popular release. We then run the JaCoCo code test coverage analysis on the same release, obtaining results on the line, instruction, and branch-level coverage of 216 392 methods. We also extracted from the source code the classes that are linked to a corresponding test class so as to limit test code coverage results to 1 263 classes with actual tests. Finally, we correlated unit tests with failures at the level of 9 523 failing tested methods. Results: Unit-tested code does not appear to be associated with fewer failures. Conclusion: Unit testing on its own may not be a sufficient method for preventing program failures.",
keywords = "Code coverage, Crash incident reports, Software reliability, Stack traces, Unit-testing",
author = "Efstathia Chioteli and Ioannis Batas and Diomidis Spinellis",
year = "2021",
month = nov,
day = "26",
doi = "10.1145/3503823.3503872",
language = "English",
series = "ACM International Conference Proceeding Series",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)",
pages = "260--264",
editor = "Vassilakopoulos, {Michael Gr.} and Karanikolas, {Nikitas N.}",
booktitle = "Proceedings - 25th Pan-Hellenic Conference on Informatics, PCI 2021",
address = "United States",
note = "25th Pan-Hellenic Conference on Informatics, PCI 2021 ; Conference date: 26-11-2021 Through 28-11-2021",
}