MIGRATING AND EVALUATING A TEST ENVIRONMENT FROM A DYNAMICALLY TO A STATICALLY TYPED LANGUAGE

Sammanfattning: Maintenance takes considerable effort in software development. Consequently, improving software maintainability can reduce costs and improve future maintenance of software. Previous research on the topic of software maintenance suggests that a type system might have impact on software maintainability. More precisely it indicates that statically-typed languages have positive impact on software maintenance in a long run. However, the previous work on the topic only takes bug fixing as an indicator of maintenance while ignoring others. Therefore, this thesis is interested in answering how the typing system affects refactoring and code navigation as two representative software maintenance activities. Furthermore, in consideration of positive impacts of static typing and increase in dynamic languages popularity in last two decades, the second aspect of this thesis is interested in software migration from dynamically typed to statically typed language. By following the process of migration, this thesis provides several contributions. The first one is state-of-the-art research on the topic of testing frameworks for embedded systems, which is used as an input for the migration process helping to produce a set of guidelines for a software migration. Finally, while it was previously shown that type system has a positive impact on bug fixing, the experiment done as a part of this thesis demonstrated that there is no difference in time it takes to refactor or navigate code except in one of the tests where statically-typed language showed better performance.