WatchDog For IntelliJ: An IDE Plugin To Analyze Software Testing Practices

Software testing is as old as software development itself – they could not exist one without the other. However, are they equally important? Do software developers devote an equivalent amount of time to both produce software and to test it? An ongoing study of the TestRoots project aims to examine and improve the state of the art of software testing and answer those questions, by observing developers’ everyday behavior. In order to support this effort, we evolved WatchDog, a single-platform software, to become the scalable, multi-platform and production-ready tool which assesses developer testing activities in multiple integrated development environments (IDEs). We further used WatchDog platform to perform a small-scale study in which we examined testing habits of developers who use IntelliJ IDEA and compared them to those of the Eclipse IDE users. Finally, we were able to confirm that IntelliJ users, similarly to the Eclipse users, do not actively practice testing inside their IDEs.Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer ScienceSoftware TechnologyThe Software Engineering Research Grou