Observation-based unit test generation at Meta

Nadia Alshahwan; Mark Harman; Alexandru Marginean; Rotem Tal; Eddy Wang

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arXiv · 2402.06111

Observation-based unit test generation at Meta

Nadia Alshahwan·Mark Harman·Alexandru Marginean·Rotem Tal·Eddy Wang

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Abstract

TestGen automatically generates unit tests, carved from serialized observations of complex objects, observed during app execution. We describe the development and deployment of TestGen at Meta. In particular, we focus on the scalability challenges overcome during development in order to deploy observation-based test carving at scale in industry. So far, TestGen has landed 518 tests into production, which have been executed 9,617,349 times in continuous integration, finding 5,702 faults. Meta is currently in the process of more widespread deployment. Our evaluation reveals that, when carving its observations from 4,361 reliable end-to-end tests, TestGen was able to generate tests for at least 86\% of the classes covered by end-to-end tests. Testing on 16 Kotlin Instagram app-launch-blocking tasks demonstrated that the TestGen tests would have trapped 13 of these before they became launch blocking.

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Nadia Alshahwan, Mark Harman, Alexandru Marginean, Rotem Tal, Eddy Wang. 2024-02-09. Observation-based unit test generation at Meta. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06111

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