Agentic LMs: Hunting Down Test Smells

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Melo, Rian, Simões, Pedro, Gheyi, Rohit, d'Amorim, Marcelo, Ribeiro, Márcio, Soares, Gustavo, Almeida, Eduardo, Soares, Elvys
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Melo, Rian
Simões, Pedro
Gheyi, Rohit
d'Amorim, Marcelo
Ribeiro, Márcio
Soares, Gustavo
Almeida, Eduardo
Soares, Elvys
author_facet Melo, Rian
Simões, Pedro
Gheyi, Rohit
d'Amorim, Marcelo
Ribeiro, Márcio
Soares, Gustavo
Almeida, Eduardo
Soares, Elvys
contents Test smells reduce test suite reliability and complicate maintenance. While many methods detect test smells, few support automated removal, and most rely on static analysis or machine learning. This study evaluates models with relatively small parameter counts - Llama-3.2-3B, Gemma-2-9B, DeepSeek-R1-14B, and Phi-4-14B - for their ability to detect and refactor test smells using agent-based workflows. We assess workflows with one, two, and four agents over 150 instances of 5 common smells from real-world Java projects. Our approach generalizes to Python, Golang, and JavaScript. All models detected nearly all instances, with Phi-4-14B achieving the best refactoring accuracy (pass@5 of 75.3%). Phi-4-14B with four-agents performed within 5% of proprietary LLMs (single-agent). Multi-agent setups outperformed single-agent ones in three of five smell types, though for Assertion Roulette, one agent sufficed. We submitted pull requests with Phi-4-14B-generated code to open-source projects and six were merged.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_07277
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Agentic LMs: Hunting Down Test Smells
Melo, Rian
Simões, Pedro
Gheyi, Rohit
d'Amorim, Marcelo
Ribeiro, Márcio
Soares, Gustavo
Almeida, Eduardo
Soares, Elvys
Software Engineering
Test smells reduce test suite reliability and complicate maintenance. While many methods detect test smells, few support automated removal, and most rely on static analysis or machine learning. This study evaluates models with relatively small parameter counts - Llama-3.2-3B, Gemma-2-9B, DeepSeek-R1-14B, and Phi-4-14B - for their ability to detect and refactor test smells using agent-based workflows. We assess workflows with one, two, and four agents over 150 instances of 5 common smells from real-world Java projects. Our approach generalizes to Python, Golang, and JavaScript. All models detected nearly all instances, with Phi-4-14B achieving the best refactoring accuracy (pass@5 of 75.3%). Phi-4-14B with four-agents performed within 5% of proprietary LLMs (single-agent). Multi-agent setups outperformed single-agent ones in three of five smell types, though for Assertion Roulette, one agent sufficed. We submitted pull requests with Phi-4-14B-generated code to open-source projects and six were merged.
title Agentic LMs: Hunting Down Test Smells
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07277