Increasing Unit Test Resilience by Decreasing Pointcut Fragility

By operating at a very detailed level, unit tests are very susceptible to changes in production code. Writing unit tests in aspect-oriented programming can help with their maintainability. However, the existing approaches do not take into account so-called pointcut fragility: a failure to address the intended join points due to small changes in the base code. An approach to increasing unit test resilience to changes in production code by decreasing pointcut fragility is proposed in this paper. The approach is implemented in AspectJ with JUnit used as a test oracle. The approach has been evaluated on several scenarios encompassing typical code modification that render unusable the tests writ- ten in a simple object-oriented way. The approach proposed in this paper managed to make the test resilient to the most of the changes introduced by these scenarios.