Automated Test Case Prioritization with Reactive GRASP

Abstract EN

Modifications in software can affect some functionality that had been working until that point.

In order to detect such a problem, the ideal solution would be testing the whole system once again, but there may be insufficient time or resources for this approach.

An alternative solution is to order the test cases so that the most beneficial tests are executed first, in such a way only a subset of the test cases can be executed with little lost of effectiveness.

Such a technique is known as regression test case prioritization.

In this paper, we propose the use of the Reactive GRASP metaheuristic to prioritize test cases.

We also compare this metaheuristic with other search-based algorithms previously described in literature.

Five programs were used in the experiments.

The experimental results demonstrated good coverage performance with some time overhead for the proposed technique.

It also demonstrated a high stability of the results generated by the proposed approach.