Connecting the Average and the Non-Average: A Study of the Rates of Fault Detection in Testing WS-BPEL Services

Many existing studies measure the effectiveness of test case prioritization techniques using the average performance on a set of test suites. However, in each regression test session, a realworld developer may only afford to apply one prioritization technique to one test suite to test a service once, even if this application results in an adverse scenario such that the actual performance in this test session is far below the average result achievable by the same technique over the same test suite for the same application. It indicates that assessing the average performance of such a technique cannot provide adequate confidence for developers to apply the technique. The authors ask a couple of questions: To what extent does the effectiveness of prioritization techniques in average scenarios correlate with that in adverse scenarios? Moreover, to what extent may a design factor of this class of techniques affect the effectiveness of prioritization in different types of scenarios? To the best of their knowledge, the authors report in this paper the first controlled experiment to study these two new research questions through more than 300 million APFD and HMFD data points produced from 19 techniques, eight WS-BPEL benchmarks and 1000 test suites prioritized by each technique 1000 times. A main result reveals a strong and linear correlation between the effectiveness in the average scenarios and that in the adverse scenarios. Another interesting result is that many pairs of levels of the same design factors significantly change their relative * © 2015 International Journal of Web Services Research. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Personal use of this material is permitted. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author’s copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the International Journal of Web Services Research.