Predicting the cost-effectiveness of regression testing strategies

Selective regression testing strategies aim at choosing an appropriate subset of test cases from among a previously run test suite for a software system, based on information about the changes made to the system to create new versions. Although there has been a significant amount of research in recent years on the design of such strategies, there has been significantly less investigation of their cost-effectiveness. In this paper some computationally efficient predictors of the cost-effectiveness of the two main classes of selective regression testing approaches are presented. A case study is described in which these predictors are used to assess the appropriateness of using a particular regression testing strategy to test multiple versions of a widely-used software system.