Test factoring with amock: generating readable unit tests from system tests

Abstract

Automated unit tests are essential for the construction of reliable software, but writing them can be tedious. If the goal of test generation is to create a lasting unit test suite (and not just to optimize execution of system tests), it is essential that generated tests can be understood by the developers that will be running them, so that they can tell the difference between real and spurious failures. amock is a system which automatically generates human-readable JUnit regression tests that use mock objects to simulate the behavior of individual objects dynamically observed during a system test execution.