On extracting unit tests from interactive live programming sessions

Software engineering methodologies, such as unit testing, propose that any effort made to ensuring that programs run correctly should be captured in repeatable and automated artifacts. However, when looking at developer activities on a spectrum from exploratory testing to scripted testing we find that many engineering activities include bursts of exploratory testing. In this paper we propose to leverage these exploratory testing bursts by automatically extracting scripted tests from a recording of live programming sessions. In order to do so, we wiretap the development environment so we can record all program input, all user-issued functions calls, and all program output of an exploratory testing session. We propose to then use clustering to extract scripted test cases from these recordings. We outline two early-stage prototypes, one for a static and one for a dynamic language. And we outline how this idea fits into the bigger research direction of live programming.