Test Case Prioritization: A Family of Empirical Studies

To reduce the cost of regression testing, software testers may prioritize their test cases so that those which are more important, by some measure, are run earlier in the regression testing process. One potential goal of such prioritization is to increase a test suite's rate of fault detection. Previous work reported the results of studies that showed that prioritization techniques can signi cantly improve rate of fault detection. Those studies, however, raised several additional questions: 1 can prioritization techniques be e ective when targeted at speci c modi ed versions; 2 what tradeo s exist between ne granularity and coarse granularity prioritization techniques; 3 can the incorporation of measures of fault proneness into prioritization techniques improve their e ectiveness? To address these questions, we have performed several new studies, in which we empirically compared prioritization techniques using both controlled experiments and case studies. The results of these stu...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: TSE
• Authors: Sebastian G. Elbaum, Alexey G. Malishevsky, Gregg Rothermel
• Keywords: Fault Detection, Prioritization Techniques, Regression Testing, TSE 2002