Linguistic Support for Unit Testing

Existing systems for writing unit tests exploit built-in language constructs, such as reflection, to simulate the addition of testing constructs. While these simulations provide the minimally necessary functionality, they fail to support testing properly in many instances. In response, we have designed, implemented, and evaluated extensions for Java that enable programmers to express test cases with language constructs. Not surprisingly, these true language extensions improve testing in many different ways, starting with basic statical checks but also allowing the collection of additional information about the unit tests.