Lightweight Assessment of Test-Case Effectiveness Using Source-Code-Quality Indicators

Test cases are crucial to help developers preventing the introduction of software faults. Unfortunately, not all tests properly designed or can effectively capture faults in production code. Some measures have been defined assess test-case effectiveness: most relevant one is mutation score, which highlights quality a test by generating so-called mutants, i.e., variations code that make it faulty and supposed identify. However, previous studies revealed analysis extremely costly hard use practice. The approaches proposed researchers so far able provide practical gains terms testing efficiency. This leaves problem efficiently assessing effectiveness as still open. In this paper, we investigate novel, orthogonal, lightweight methodology particular, study feasibility exploit test-code-quality indicators estimate score case. We first select set 67 factors their relation with effectiveness. Then, devise estimation model exploiting such its performance well features. key results reveal our only based on static features has 86 percent both F-Measure AUC-ROC. means effectiveness, using source-code-quality indicators, high accuracy without executing tests. As consequence, approach beyond typical limitations current techniques.