An Experimental Evaluation of Continuous Testing During Development David Saff Michael D. Ernst MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab The Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street Cambridge, MA 02139 USA fsaff,
[email protected] ABSTRACT modern development environments that gives rapid feedback about Continuous testing uses excess cycles on a developer’s workstation compilation errors. This paper experimentally evaluates whether to continuously run regression tests in the background, providing the extra feedback from continuous testing assists developers in a rapid feedback about test failures as source code is edited. It is programming task without producing harmful side effects. intended to reduce the time and energy required to keep code well- It is good practice to use a regression test suite while perform- tested and prevent regression errors from persisting uncaught for ing development tasks such as enhancing or refactoring an existing long periods of time. This paper reports on a controlled human codebase. (Test-driven development [3] seeks to extend this situ- experiment to evaluate whether students using continuous testing ation to all development tasks: before each piece of functionality are more successful in completing programming assignments. We is added, a test for the functionality is written, added to the suite, also summarize users’ subjective impressions and discuss why the and observed to fail.) During development, running the test suite results may generalize. bolsters the developer’s confidence that they are making steady The experiment indicates that the tool has a statistically signif- progress, and catches regression errors early. The longer a regres- icant effect on success in completing a programming task, but no sion error persists without being caught, the larger its drain on pro- such effect on time worked.