Enhancing Efficiency of the Test Case Prioritization Technique by Improving the Rate of Fault Detection

Test case prioritization techniques organize test cases for implementation in a manner that enhance their efficacy in accordance with some performance goal. The main aim of regression testing is to test the amended software to assure that the amendments performed in software are correct. It is not always feasible to retest entire test cases in a test suite due to limited resources. Therefore, it is necessary to develop some effective techniques that can enhance the regression testing effectiveness by organizing the test cases in an order following some testing criterion. One possible criterion of such prioritization is to enhance a test suite’s fault detection rate. It aspires to arrange test cases in an order that higher priority test cases run earlier than lower ones. This paper proposed a methodology for prioritizing regression test cases based on four factors namely the rate of fault detection, the number of faults detected, the test case ability of risk detection and the test case effectiveness. The proposed approach is implemented on two projects. The resultant test case order is analyzed with other prioritization techniques such as no prioritization, random prioritization, reverse prioritization, optimal prioritization and along with previous works for project 1. We have applied our proposed approach for prioritizing test cases in an order that maximize fault coverage with least test suite execution and compared its effectiveness with other orderings. The result of proposed approach shows higher average percentage of fault detected value and outperforms all other approaches.