Test-to-code traceability: Why and how?

In agile development, test suites are a valuable source of up-to-date documentation as developers continuously changes them to reflect changes in the production code to preserve an effective regression suite. Despite its importance, test-to-code traceability is not common in software development and, when needed, traceability information has to be recovered during software development and evolution. The main goal of this paper is focusing on the problem of supporting software maintenance through a mechanism for establishing traceability relations between the test cases and its code elements. This supports the developer during the identification of links between test suites and tested classes, and helps the software engineer to keep the consistency between unit tests and source code to make sure that all unit tests continue to pass after their related classes are modified. The survey highlights the limitations of the experimented traceability recovery approaches, showing that detecting the code under test cannot be fully automated and some issues are still under study.