An Integrated Decision Approach with Probabilistic Linguistic Information for Test Case Prioritization

Abstract

This paper focuses on an exciting and essential problem in software companies. The software life cycle includes testing software, which is often time-consuming, and is a critical phase in the software development process. To reduce time spent on testing and to maintain software quality, the idea of a systematic selection of test cases is needed. Attracted by the claim, researchers presented test case prioritization (TCP) by applying the concepts of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM). However, the literature on TCP suffers from the following issues: (i) difficulty in properly handling uncertainty; (ii) systematic evaluation of criteria by understanding the hesitation of experts; and (iii) rational prioritization of test cases by considering the nature of criteria. Motivated by these issues, an integrated approach is put forward that could circumvent the problem in this paper. The main aim of this research is to develop a decision model with integrated methods for TCP. The core importance of the proposed model is to (i) provide a systematic/methodical decision on TCP with a reduction in testing time and cost; (ii) help software personnel choose an apt test case from the suite for testing software; (iii) reduce human bias by mitigating intervention of personnel in the decision process. To this end, probabilistic linguistic information (PLI) is adopted as the preference structure that could flexibly handle uncertainty by associating occurrence probability to each linguistic term. Furthermore, an attitude-based entropy measure is presented for criteria weight calculation, and finally, the EDAS ranking method is extended to PLI for TCP. An empirical study of TCP in a software company is presented to certify the integrated approach’s effectiveness. The strengths and weaknesses of the introduced approach are conferred by comparing it with the relevant methods.