  Software testing is a mandatory activity in any serious software development
process, as bugs are a reality in software development. This raises the
question of quality: good tests are effective in finding bugs, but until a test
case actually finds a bug, its effectiveness remains unknown. Therefore,
determining what constitutes a good or bad test is necessary. This is not a
simple task, and there are a number of studies that identify different
characteristics of a good test case. A previous study evaluated 29 hypotheses
regarding what constitutes a good test case, but the findings are based on
developers' beliefs, which are subjective and biased. In this paper we
investigate eight of these hypotheses, through an extensive empirical study
based on open software repositories. Despite our best efforts, we were unable
to find evidence that supports these beliefs. This indicates that, although
these hypotheses represent good software engineering advice, they do not
necessarily mean that they are enough to provide the desired outcome of good
testing code.
