DevOps Enhancement with Continuous Test Optimization

Growing evidence suggests the DevOps approach enables faster development and deployment, and easier maintenance of applications. Still, the efficiency of DevOps is constrained by long cycle times. This paper presents the approach for improving time-efficiency in DevOps, and in particular continuous integration testing, using continuous test optimization. The approach uses test redundancy analysis to discover test overlap with respect to feature interaction coverage, and based on detected redundancy to reduce the size of a test suite. Smallersize test suites execute faster and enable shorter test cycles, which further enables shorter release cycles. The approach has been experimentally evaluated using an industrial case study, against three metrics: industry practice of test selection for continuous integration testing, retest-all approach, and random test selection. The results suggest that the proposed test redundancy detection and reduction efficiently reduces test cycles in CI compared to industry practice and retest-all approach, and improves faultdetection effectiveness compared to random test selection.