DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF TEST CASE PRIORITIZATION TECHNIQUE USING GENETIC ALGORITHMS

Abstract

ABSTRACT Software evolution is a term used for repeated modifications in a software system caused by changing existing requirements, emerging new requirements or bug fixes. A small change in the software system may lead to malfunctioning of the existing software system. Thus, there arises the need for Regression Testing. Regression Testing is the process of testing a software system after it has undergone changes. It aims to detect faults, if any, that may have been introduced into the software system as a result of these changes. It requires rerunning the modified test suite but rerunning may significantly increase the time and effort required for regression testing. Test Case Prioritization aims to reduce the time and effort required in regression testing by prioritizing the test cases so as to increase the rate of fault detection. In this thesis we propose and validate a test case prioritization framework for object oriented systems based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) and using modified Average Percentage of Block Coverage (APBCm) metric as fitness function in GA based tool. The results are obtained using two open source softwares JTopas and Xml-Security. We have used fault coverage criteria to validate the prioritized test case sequence produced by the proposed framework when applied to two open source projects JTopas and Xml-Security. The results show that the framework can be used to obtain better prioritized test case sequences with higher fault detection rate.