A Mapping Study of Automation Support Tools for Unit Testing

Abstract: Unit testing is defined as a test activity usually performed by a developer for the purpose of demonstrating program functionality and meeting the requirements specification of module. Nowadays, unit testing is considered as an integral part in the software development cycle. However, performing unit testing by developers is still considered as a major concern because of the time and cost involved in it. Automation support for unit testing, in the form of various automation tools, could significantly lower the cost of performing unit testing phase as well as decrease the time developer involved in the actual testing. The problem is how to choose the most appropriate tool that will suit developer requirements consisting of cost involved, effort needed, level of automation provided, language support, etc. This research work presents results from a systematic literature review with the aim of finding all unit testing tools with an automation support. In the systematic literature review, we initially identified 1957 studies. After performing several removal stages, 112 primary studies were listed and 24 tools identified in total. Along with the list of tools, we also provide the categorization of all the tools found based on the programming language support, availability (License, Open source, Free), testing technique, level of effort required by developer to use tool, target domain, that we consider as good properties for a developer to make a decision on which tool to use. Additionally, we categorized type of error(s) found by some tools, which could be beneficial for a developer when looking at the tool’s effectiveness. The main intent of this report is to aid developers in the process of choosing an appropriate unit testing tool from categorization table of available tools with automation unit testing support that ease this process significantly. This work could be beneficial for researchers considering to evaluate efficiency and effectiveness of each tool and use this information to eventually build a new tool with the same properties as several others.