Who Guards the Guards? On the Validation of Test Case Migration

Abstract

Software migration, as a well-established strategy to reuse software, results in a software system that runs in a new environment but exhibits the same behavior as before the migration. To ensure behavioral preservation, existing test cases can be used to safeguard the software migration. This implies two things: test cases have to be co-migrated with the system and, after the migration, they have to be validated as well. Similarly as for system migration, behavioral preservation is a must for test case migration, i.e., the migrated test cases still have to assert the same expected system behavior as the old test cases. Despite the importance of validating test case migration, the area is not yet well researched. In this paper, we analyze the challenges in validating test case migration and propose mutation analysis as a suitable validation technique.