Test Suite Minimization using Selective Redundancy

Abstract

Software testing is a process of checking the correctness of software thereby can deal with defects of the software and prevent loss due to defects. Test suite sizes may grow significantly with modifications to the software over time. Due to time and resource constraints for regression testing, test suite minimization techniques attempt to remove those test cases from the test suite that have become redundant over time since the requirements covered by them are also covered by other test cases in the test suite. In this paper, we present an approach to test suite reduction that attempts toselectively keep redundant tests in the reduced suites. Our approach can significantly improve the fault detection effectiveness of reduced suites without severely affecting the extent of test suite size reduction. Evaluations were performed on fifteen java programs and our study shows that, though there is an increase in the number of reduced test cases compared to HGS algorithm, our algorithm has comparatively more fault detection effectiveness than HGS.