Historical value-based approach for cost-cognizant test case prioritization to improve the effectiveness of regression testing

Abstract

Software, once developed one, has a long life and evolves through numerous additions and modifications because of the fault, the change of user requirement, the change of environment, and so forth. With the evolution of the software, assuring the quality of the software is getting more difficult because numerous versions of the software make it hard to manage themselves. Regression testing was introduced to provide the way to support the software testing activities and assure acquiring appropriate quality through several versions of software during software development and maintenance. Regression testing, however, is too expensive because there are lots of test cases and the number of test cases increases sharply as software evolves. For this reason, various techniques are introduced to support regression testing and test case prioritization is perceived as the most effective techniques for regression testing among several techniques for regression testing. In this thesis, we propose an approach, Historical Value-Based Approach, which is based on the use of historical information to estimate the current cost and fault severity for Cost-cognizant test case prioritization. For contribution, the proposed approach helps the stakeholders of the testing know how historical values are used in their testing for the improvements on the test effectiveness in terms of the value. As a result, software testers who conduct regression testing are able to prioritizing their test cases more effectively so that the test effectiveness of their testing can be possibly improved. We also conducted a controlled experiment to validate the proposed approach with comparing the existing test case prioritization technique and the result of the experiment proved the usefulness and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Consequently, the experimental result shows that Historical Value- Based Approach for Cost-cognizant test case prioritization produces better results, better APFDc, t...