Inspecting Automated Test Code: a Preliminary Study

Testing is an essential part of an agile process as test is automated and tends to take the role of specifications in place of documents. However, whenever test cases are faulty, developers' time might be wasted to fix problems that do not actually originate in the production code. Because of their relevance in agile processes, we posit that the quality of test cases can be assured through software inspections as a complement to the informal review activity which occurs in pair programming. Inspections can thus help the identification of what might be wrong in test code and where refactoring is needed. In this paper, we report on a preliminary empirical study where we examine the effect of conducting software inspections on automated test code. First results show that software inspections can improve the quality of test code, especially the repeatability attribute. The benefit of software inspections also apply when automated unit tests are created by developers working in pair programming mode.