Analyzing Test Completeness for Dynamic Languages

Christoffer Quist Adamsen, Gianluca Mezzetti, and Anders Møller

In dynamically typed programming languages, type errors can occur at runtime. Executing the test suites that often accompany programs may provide some confidence about absence of such errors, but generally without giving any guarantees. We present a program analysis that can check whether a test suite has sufficient coverage to prove a given type-related property, which is particularly challenging for program code with overloading and value dependent types. The analysis achieves a synergy between scalable static analysis and dynamic analysis that goes beyond what can be accomplished with the static analysis alone. Additionally, the analysis provides a new coverage adequacy metric as a measure of the completeness of a test suite for a family of type-related properties.

Based on an implementation for Dart, we demonstrate how such a hybrid static/dynamic program analysis can be used for measuring the quality of a test suite with respect to showing absence of type errors and inferring sound call graph information, specifically for program code that is difficult to handle for traditional static analysis techniques.

[ BibTeX ]