AN ANALYSIS OF TEST SUITE MINIMIZATION TECHNIQUES

In software development, testing is widely used by developers to reveal faults that cause failures and improve the quality of the software by omitting or removing the detected faults. Test suites for testing and validating software programs can contain large numbers of test cases to execute various parts of the software program code to check for defects and code compliance. Test suite sizes may grow significantly with subsequent modifications to the software over time that causes redundancy in test suites. Due to time and resource constraints retesting the modified software every time, it is advantageous to develop techniques that manage test suite sizes by periodically removing duplicate test cases, in turn, can improve the maintenance efforts required for regression testing. The primary objective of test suite reduction is to effectively improve the testing process while maintaining Fault Detection Effectiveness and fulfilling all the testing requirements as well. Researchers have proposed some TSR heuristics based on different variations of a greedy algorithm. This paper presents a comparative study of test suite reduction techniques based on some parameters.