Establishing Traceability Links between Unit Test Cases and Units under Test

Coding and testing are two activities that are tightly intermingled in agile software development, requiring developers to frequently shift between production code and test artifacts. Unfortunately, links between these artifacts are typically implicitly present in the source code, forcing developers towards time consuming code inspections. In this work, we evaluate the potential of six traceability resolution strategies involving test naming and design conventions, static call graphs, call behavior before asserts, lexical analysis and version log mining to make the relation between developer test cases and units under test explicit. The results show that test conventions yield highly accurate results, yet in their absence capturing the destination type of calls right before assert statements appears as a valuable alternative. Combining these strategies allows the user to find a balance between improved applicability and accuracy.