TestSpark: IntelliJ IDEA's Ultimate Test Generation Companion

TL;DR

TestSpark is an IntelliJ IDEA plugin that simplifies automated unit test generation using AI and search-based techniques, enabling easy test creation, modification, and integration within the IDE.

Contribution

It introduces a user-friendly, extendable plugin that combines search-based and AI-driven test generation methods directly in the IDE environment.

Findings

TestSpark enables quick test generation within IDE

It incorporates LLMs for improved test creation

Open-source and easily extendable tool

Abstract

Writing software tests is laborious and time-consuming. To address this, prior studies introduced various automated test-generation techniques. A well-explored research direction in this field is unit test generation, wherein artificial intelligence (AI) techniques create tests for a method/class under test. While many of these techniques have primarily found applications in a research context, existing tools (e.g., EvoSuite, Randoop, and AthenaTest) are not user-friendly and are tailored to a single technique. This paper introduces TestSpark, a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA that enables users to generate unit tests with only a few clicks directly within their Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Furthermore, TestSpark also allows users to easily modify and run each generated test and integrate them into the project workflow. TestSpark leverages the advances of search-based test generation tools, and it introduces a technique to generate unit tests using Large Language Models (LLMs) by creating a feedback cycle between the IDE and the LLM. Since TestSpark is an open-source (https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/TestSpark), extendable, and well-documented tool, it is possible to add new test generation methods into the plugin with the minimum effort. This paper also explains our future studies related to TestSpark and our preliminary results. Demo video: https://youtu.be/0F4PrxWfiXo