Towards an Extensible Architecture for Refactoring Test Code

As the software evolves, new codes are written, and many other codes are refactored. Refactoring also involves the test code, to ensure that it continues performed, and adequately verifying the behavior of the software. This work proposes the creation of an extensible architecture named EARTC to perform refactoring safely in test code. The coding of a specific refactoring for the test code is hampered by coupling to the unit testing automation framework so that it becomes desirable to eliminate this coupling from the refactoring code. The architecture proposed in this work implements extension points, which allows refactoring to be performed regardless of the test framework to be used, that is, other refactorings can be added to the architecture without the need to change the test code. Additionally, the architecture enables other testing frameworks to be coupled without interfering with their internal structure. To validate the independence among architecture modules, a Design Structure Matrix was done, which shows that the objectives were achieved. Also, to analyze the results of the proposed architecture in an experiment, a tool called Neutrino was implemented. The results obtained with Neutrino are satisfactory and show that the architecture meets the objectives described for the accomplishment of this work.