Theses and Dissertations

Advisor

Gudla, Charan

Committee Member

Torri, Stephen

Committee Member

Chen, Zhiqian

Date of Degree

5-15-2026

Original embargo terms

Immediate Worldwide Access

Document Type

Dissertation - Open Access

Major

Computer Science

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

James Worth Bagley College of Engineering

Department

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Abstract

Unit test suites are intended to support safe and efficient source code refactoring, yet in practice they can hinder rather than help when tests are tightly coupled to implementation details. Such non-resilient tests require frequent co-evolution, consume valuable engineering time, and may disincentivize beneficial code improvements. While concepts such as passive and active resilience, test smells, and technical debt have been studied individually, they have not been integrated into a single actionable framework, nor has their pedagogical value been systematically evaluated. This dissertation introduces a novel conceptual framework for the resilience of unit test suites to refactoring, grounded in resilience engineering principles and informed by empirical evidence from professional software engineers. The framework identifies resilience factors, catalogs non-resilient unit test smells with mitigation strategies, and integrates both passive and active resilience techniques. To evaluate its educational effectiveness, we conducted a controlled experiment with software engineering students. Participants received either baseline training or baseline training plus framework instruction, and their performance was assessed through programming and analysis tasks. Results indicate that students exposed to the framework were more capable of identifying resilience-related issues and proposing effective mitigations. These findings demonstrate that resilience concepts, when explicitly taught, can improve developers' ability to create and maintain robust, refactor-friendly test suites. The contributions of this work include: (1) the first resilience-oriented conceptual framework for unit test suites; (2) a catalog of non-resilient test smells; and (3) experimental evidence of the framework's pedagogical benefits. Together, these contributions advance both the theory and practice of software testing and refactoring.

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