  Unit testing is an essential component of the software development
life-cycle. A developer could easily and quickly catch and fix software faults
introduced in the source code by creating and running unit tests. Despite their
importance, unit tests are subject to bad design or implementation decisions,
the so-called test smells. These might decrease software systems quality from
various aspects, making it harder to understand, more complex to maintain, and
more prone to errors and bugs. Many studies discuss the likely effects of test
smells on test code. However, there is a lack of studies that capture
developers perceptions of such issues. This study empirically analyzes how
developers perceive the severity of test smells in the test code they develop.
Severity refers to the degree to how a test smell may negatively impact the
test code. We selected six open-source software projects from GitHub and
interviewed their developers to understand whether and how the test smells
affected the test code. Although most of the interviewed developers considered
the test smells as having a low severity to their code, they indicated that
test smells might negatively impact the project, particularly in test code
maintainability and evolution. Also, detecting and removing test smells from
the test code may be positive for the project.
