An Eclipse plug-in for Test-to-Code Traceability Recovery

Developers write and maintain unit tests continually in order to reflect changes in the production code and maintain an effective regression test suite. In addition, during refactoring developers must ensure that all unit tests continue to pass, so unit tests often need to be refactored together with the source code. Traceability links between application code and respective unit tests are extremely useful to preserving consistency during refactoring. Unfortunately, support for identifying and maintaining traceability links between unit tests and tested classes in contemporary software engineering environments and tools is not satisfactory. This paper presents SCOTCH (Slicing and COupling based Test to Code trace Hunter), a tool implemented as an Eclipse plug-in that uses dynamic slicing and conceptual coupling to automatically establish the traceability links between unit tests and application code. The evaluation of SCOTCH on several software systems highlights its usefulness as a feature within a software development environment.