Incorporating Historical Test Case Performance Data and Resource Constraints into Test Case Prioritization

Software regression testing occurs continuously during the software development process in order to detect faults as early as possible. Growing size of test suites on one hand and resource constraints on the other hand, necessitates the test case prioritization process. Test case prioritization techniques schedule test cases for regression testing in an order that increases the chances of early detection of faults. Some prior techniques used the notion of historybased test case prioritization. In this paper, we present a new approach for prioritization using historical test case performance data which considers time and resource constraints. This approach directly calculates the priority of each test case using historical information from the previous executions of the test case. The results of applying our approach to Siemens suite and Space program are also presented. Our results present interesting insights into the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of faster fault detection.