SoCRATES: Scala radar for test smells

Test smells are indications of poorly designed unit tests. Previous studies have demonstrated their negative impact on test understanding and maintenance. Moreover, surveys show that developers are not able to identify test smells, hindering optimal software quality. Automated tools can aid developers to handle these issues and detect test smells in the early stage of software development. However, few tools are publicly available and all of them target JUnit - the most popular testing framework in Java. To overcome these limitations, we propose SoCRATES. This fully automated tool is able to identify six test smells in Scala Test which is the most prevalent testing framework in Scala. An empirical investigation on 164 Scala projects shows that our tool is able to reach a high precision without sacrificing recall. Moreover, the results show that Scala projects have a lower diffusion than Java projects. We make SoCRATES publicly available as an IntelliJ IDEA plugin, as well as an open-source project in order to facilitate the detection of test smells.