You're invited to participate in our research!

At Software Improvement Group, we're constantly looking for ways to help you improve your code. We have a very active software engineering research department working with Universities from around the world. One of the fields of interest is the quality of test code. And we'd like to invite you to help us validate our research. Our research partner for this topic is the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

"Detecting relevant test smells will help you to get better insight into the quality of your test code." - Martin Schvarcbacher

What types of test smells are detected?

We detect in your Java code the following test smells: Assertion roulette, conditional test logic, eager tests, general fixture, magic number tests, mystery guest, resource optimism, sleepy tests, verbose tests, ignored tests and empty tests.

How to participate?

Our researchers have created an incubator version of Better Code Hub (BCH). In this special version, they've changed the Automate Tests guideline to detect Test Smells. This concept is similar to code smells in production, but now we've applied it to unit tests in Java code. We invite you to run multiple BCH analyses on your Java code and help the research by validating the results.

How to use the BCH incubator?

Click the video to see the BCH Incubator in action: https://youtu.be/L-FXqEd19Pk

To sum up...

1. Visit the incubator version of Better Code Hub at https://incubator.sig.eu/TEST-SMELLS/
2. Log in with your Github account and accept the two security scopes for the new GitHub OAuth app on first use.
3. After running an analysis and clicking on the first guideline "RESEARCH: Adding Test Quality Metrics to Automate Tests", you will see a list of test smells in your project if they exist ;-)
4. Please validate our detection of the test smells by providing feedback via an ultra short survey for each test smell finding.
5. Don't forget to complete your user profile at https://incubator.sig.eu/TEST-SMELLS/user-profile, this will help us understand your experience level.

What's in it for you?

• As a token of our appreciation, you'll be given an Individual license for the duration of the research. This allows you to analyse your personal public and private repositories along with public organisation repositories with the incubator version of Better Code Hub.
• Sorry, Java only ;-)
• Currently the test smell detection works only on Java source code. If you would like to help with this research and don’t have any Java projects, you can fork some of the well-known Java projects to your GitHub profile and run the analysis on them. Some projects you could use:

https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework

https://github.com/ReactiveX/RxJava

https://github.com/mockito/mockito

Thank you!

If you have any questions or feedback, please drop us an e-mail at [email protected].