A simulation study on some heuristics for test suite reduction

Abstract

In order to test a program, software testers must first define a testing objective. From this a test suite is then constructed. In fact, some subsets of the constructed test suite may still satisfy the same testing objective. Such subsets are referred to as representative sets of the test suite. Finding the optimal representative sets of the test suite reduction problem is known to be NP-complete. Different heuristics, including G, GE, grE and H, have been proposed by different researchers. However, it has been demonstrated that none of these four heuristics are guaranteed to deliver smaller sized representative sets. This paper presents the result of a simulation study of these four heuristics. The aim of the study is to provide application guidelines for choosing the most appropriate heuristic for test suite reduction.