Test Case Recommendations with Distributed Representation of Code
  Syntactic Features
Mosab Rezaei Hamed Alhoori Mona Rahimi
Frequent modifications of unit test cases are inevitable due to software's
continuous underlying changes in source code, design, and requirements. Since
manually maintaining software test suites is tedious, timely, and costly,
automating the process of generation and maintenance of test units will
significantly impact the effectiveness and efficiency of software testing
processes.
  To this end, we propose an automated approach which exploits both structural
and semantic properties of source code methods and test cases to recommend the
most relevant and useful unit tests to the developers. The proposed approach
initially trains a neural network to transform method-level source code, as
well as unit tests, into distributed representations (embedded vectors) while
preserving the importance of the structure in the code. Retrieving the semantic
and structural properties of a given method, the approach computes cosine
similarity between the method's embedding and the previously-embedded training
instances. Further, according to the similarity scores between the embedding
vectors, the model identifies the closest methods of embedding and the
associated unit tests as the most similar recommendations.
  The results on the Methods2Test dataset showed that, while there is no
guarantee to have similar relevant test cases for the group of similar methods,
the proposed approach extracts the most similar existing test cases for a given
method in the dataset, and evaluations show that recommended test cases
decrease the developers' effort to generating expected test cases.