Measuring and Mitigating Gaps in Structural Testing

Structural code coverage is a popular test adequacy metric that measures the percentage of program structure (e.g., statement, branch, decision) executed by a test suite. While structural coverage has several benefits, previous studies suggested that code coverage is not a good indicator of a test suite's fault-detection effectiveness as coverage computation does not consider test oracle quality. In this research, we formally define the coverage gap in structural testing as the percentage of program structure that is executed but not observed by any test oracles. Our large-scale empirical study of 13 Java applications, 16K test cases and 51.6K test assertions shows that even for mature test suites, the gap can be as high as 51 percentage points (pp) and 34pp on average. Our study reveals that the coverage gap strongly and negatively correlates with a test suite's fault-detection effectiveness. To mitigate gaps, we propose a lightweight static analysis of program dependencies to produce a ranked recommendation of test focus methods that can reduce the gap and improve test suite quality. When considering 34.8K assertions in the test suite as ground truth, the recommender suggests two-thirds of the focus methods written by developers within the top five recommendations.