Reusing and Composing Tests with Traits

Single inheritance often forces developers to duplicate code and logic. This widely recognized situation affects both business code and tests. In a large and complex application whose classes implement many groups of methods (protocols), duplication may also follow the application’s idiosyncrasies, making it difficult to specify, maintain, and reuse tests. The research questions we faced are (i) how can we reuse test specifications across and within complex inheritance hierarchies, especially in presence of orthogonal protocols; (ii) how can we test interface behavior in a modular way; (iii) how far can we reuse and parametrize composable tests.

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