Test betiklerindeki kod klonlarının otomatik tanımlanması ve tekrarın ortadan kaldırılması için yeniden yapılandırılması

Code clones in test scripts can significantly reduce maintainability. They can lead to duplication especially in ecosystems and product families where applications have commonalities in their test scenarios. Our goal is to eliminate duplication in test scripts for reducing their size and improving their maintainability. In particular, we focus on Python test scripts and propose an automated approach to identify commonalities, detect variations, and apply refactoring. We compare the effectiveness of various clone detection tools in identifying code clones at the function level in Python test scripts. We apply static analysis to detect variations and code dependencies among similar functions to steer the automated refactoring process. The refactoring approach involves extracting new functions or generalizing existing functions through parameterization. We validate our approach through case studies on one industrial and three open-source projects. Our findings indicate that automated refactoring can lead to a reduction of up to 8% in the size of test scripts. Automated detection and refactoring of code clones in test scripts can eliminate code duplication and reduce the script size. The proposed approach, validated through case studies, shows promising results and can be applied in various software ecosystems to improve test script maintainability