A survey on test practitioners' awareness of test smells

Developing test code may be a time-consuming task that usually requires much effort and cost, especially when it is done manually. Besides, during this process, developers and testers are likely to adopt bad design choices, which may lead to the introduction of the so-called test smells in test code. Test smells are bad solutions to either implement or design test code. As the test code with test smells increases in size, these tests might become more complex, and as a consequence, much harder to understand and evolve correctly. Therefore, test smells may have a negative impact on the quality and maintenance of test code and may also harm the whole software testing activities. In this context, this study aims to understand whether test professionals non-intentionally insert test smells. We carried out an expert survey to analyze the usage frequency of a set of test smells. Sixty professionals from different companies participated in the survey. We selected 14 widely studied smells from the literature, which are also implemented in existing test smell detection tools. The yielded results indicate that experienced professionals introduce test smells during their daily programming tasks, even when they are using standardized practices from their companies, and not only for their personal assumptions. Another relevant evidence was that developers' professional experience can not be considered as a root-cause for the insertion of test smells in test code.