TAPE Test Code Adaptation Plug-in for Eclipse

Refactoring improves the design of software and makes it easier to maintain by eliminating code smells. As manual refactoring is often error-prone and time-consuming, automated refactoring is considered a better choice. Refactoring tools are available in almost all major object oriented programming languages like java, C++, C# etc and provide varying degree of automation. The problem with these tools is that they do not support adaptation of unit tests of the refactored code resulting in invalid unit tests. Unit tests are the only safety net available to developers to verify the system behavior after refactoring. Once these tests get broken there is no way to describe whether the system preserved its behavior or not. In this paper we provide technical details of TAPE (Test code Adaptation Plug-in for Eclipse). This tool not only automates a few commonly used refactorings but also supports adaptation of unit tests affected by the refactoring process. Using this tool the developers can concentrate more on code development activities instead of resolving consistency issues between code and unit tests. Keywords-Refactoring; Unit testing; Adaptation, maintenance