Dear Developers of the Apache HBase project,
My name is Kevin van den Bekerom and I am currently doing my Master's research on the topic of false alarms in test code. I would like to ask the input of the HBase development team categorizing test code bugs. My research is based on a recent paper by Arash et al. ( http://salt.ece.ubc.ca/publications/docs/icsme15.pdf). They conducted an empirical study, categorizing "test code bugs" in Apache software projects, e.g. semantic, flaky, environmental, etc. A "test code bug" is a failing test, where the System Under Test is correct, but the test code is incorrect. To identify test code bugs they looked at issues in JIRA, and checked if the fixing commit was only in the test code. Only fixed issues were counted and categorised. My goal is to replicate their results using a different approach, i.e. ask developers that were involved in the issue and/or fix how they would categorize it. For the HBase project they counted 440 test code bugs. Insight into false positives can therefore be very relevant for your project. Note that the authors only sampled a number of identified test code bugs for individual inspection. I would like to ask the HBase team’s participation in categorizing the various test bugs. I will provide a list of JIRA IDs which are identified as test code bugs and an initial list of categories (assertion fault, obsolete assertion, test dependency, etc) to aid in the categorisation process with short explanations. In my belief, the developers that worked on the issue are the one's that are most capable of categorizing the issue. Please let me know if this project looks interesting to you and if you are willing to help me out. As a next step I will look for common patterns in identified test code bugs and my aim is to extent static source code analysis techniques to be also suited to find test code bugs. I am of course very happy to share my findings with the team. Hope to hear from you! With kind regards, -- *Kevin van den Bekerom* | Intern +31 6 21 33 93 85 | kvandenbeke...@sig.eu Software Improvement Group | www.sig.eu
