A new heuristic for test suite reduction

Abstract A testing objective has to be defined in testing a program. A test suite is then constructed to satisfy the testing objective. The constructed test suite contains redundancy when some of its proper subsets can still satisfy the same testing objective. Since the costs of executing test cases and maintaining a test suite for regression testing may be expensive, the problem of test suite reduction arises. This paper proposes a heuristic towards the optimization of a test suite.

[1]  Dewayne E. Perry,et al.  Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering , 1995, ICSE 1995.

[2]  Joseph Robert Horgan,et al.  Effect of Test Set Minimization on Fault Detection Effectiveness , 1995, 1995 17th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[3]  C. V. Ramamoorthy,et al.  On the Automated Generation of Program Test Data , 1976, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[4]  Glenford J. Myers,et al.  Software Reliability: Principles and Practices , 1976 .

[5]  A. Jefferson Offutt,et al.  Constraint-Based Automatic Test Data Generation , 1991, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[6]  Alfred V. Aho,et al.  Data Structures and Algorithms , 1983 .

[7]  Mary Lou Soffa,et al.  A methodology for controlling the size of a test suite , 1993, TSEM.

[8]  David S. Johnson,et al.  Approximation algorithms for combinatorial problems , 1973, STOC.

[9]  Joseph Robert Horgan,et al.  Test set size minimization and fault detection effectiveness: a case study in a space application , 1997, Proceedings Twenty-First Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC'97).

[10]  Tsong Yueh Chen,et al.  Dividing Strategies for the Optimization of a Test Suite , 1996, Inf. Process. Lett..

[11]  Bogdan Korel,et al.  Automated Software Test Data Generation , 1990, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[12]  Ronald L. Rivest,et al.  Introduction to Algorithms , 1990 .

[13]  Wei-Tek Tsai,et al.  Automated Test Case Generation for Programs Specified by Relational Algebra Queries , 1990, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[14]  Elaine J. Weyuker Translatability and Decidability Questions for Restricted Classes of Program Schemas , 1979, SIAM J. Comput..