Unit Test Generation During Software Development: EvoSuite Plugins for Maven, IntelliJ and Jenkins

Different techniques to automatically generate unit
tests for object oriented classes have been proposed, but how
to integrate these tools into the daily activities of software
development is a little investigated question. In this paper, we
report on our experience in supporting industrial partners in
introducing the EVOSUITE automated JUnit test generation tool
in their software development processes. The first step consisted
of providing a plugin to the Apache Maven build infrastructure.
The move from a research-oriented point-and-click tool to an
automated step of the build process has implications on how
developers interact with the tool and generated tests, and therefore,
we produced a plugin for the popular IntelliJ Integrated
Development Environment (IDE). As build automation is a core
component of Continuous Integration (CI), we provide a further
plugin to the Jenkins CI system, which allows developers to monitor
the results of EVOSUITE and integrate generated tests in their
source tree. In this paper, we discuss the resulting architecture of
the plugins, and the challenges arising when building such plugins.
Although the plugins described are targeted for the EVOSUITE
tool, they can be adapted and their architecture can be reused
for other test generation tools as well.