Modular Construction of Context-Specific Test Case Migration Methods

Migration of test cases has a twofold benefit in software migration projects: reuse of valuable knowledge as well as time and cost savings. The diversity of software migration project contexts require a flexible and modular construction method to address several aspects like different system and test environments or the impact of the system changes on the test cases. When an inappropriate migration method is used, it may increase the effort and the costs and also decrease the overall software quality. Therefore, a critical task in test case migration is to provide a transformation method which fits the context. To address this problem, in this paper, we present a framework that enables a modular construction of context-specific migration methods for test cases by assembling predefined building blocks. Our approach builds upon an existing framework for modular construction of software transformation methods and consists of a method base and a method engineering process. Method fragments are the atomic building blocks of a migration method, whereas method patterns encode specific migration strategies. The guidance on development and enactment of migration methods is provided by the method engineering process. We evaluate our approach in an industrial case study where a part of the Eclipse Modeling Framework was migrated from Java to C#.