Unit Test Virtualization with VMVM Jonathan Bell Gail Kaiser Columbia University Columbia University 500 West 120th St, MC 0401 500 West 120th St, MC 0401 New York, NY USA New York, NY USA
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT by the test suite. These tests are added to existing unit test Testing large software packages can become very time in- suites and in an ideal continuous integration environment, tensive. To address this problem, researchers have inves- executed regularly (e.g., upon code check-ins, or nightly). tigated techniques such as Test Suite Minimization. Test Because developers are often creating new tests, as software Suite Minimization reduces the number of tests in a suite grows in size and complexity, its test suite frequently grows by removing tests that appear redundant, at the risk of a similarly. Software can reach a point where its test suite has reduction in fault-finding ability since it can be difficult to gotten so large that it takes too long to regularly execute identify which tests are truly redundant. We take a com- | previous work has reported test suites in industry taking pletely different approach to solving the same problem of several weeks to execute fully [36]. long running test suites by instead reducing the time needed To cope with long running test suites, testers might turn to execute each test, an approach that we call Unit Test to Test Suite Minimization or Test Suite Prioritization [43]. Virtualization. With Unit Test Virtualization, we reduce Test Suite Minimization techniques such as [14, 15, 22, 23, the overhead of isolating each unit test with a lightweight 27, 28, 38, 41] seek to reduce the total number of tests to virtualization container.