Ant Colony Optimization Based Test Case Selection for Component Based Software

Abstract

Reusability is one of the prime aspects of high quality software. Based on the concept of reusing the previous effort, Component based software engineering is a widely evolving software development paradigm that sets new challenges for testing team. The third party components need to be selected and assembled in development framework. Components interact with each other for various services and the interface between them can prove as the point of failure. As exhaustive testing of all interaction sequences is not possible, there is need for automated test case reduction and prioritization techniques to increase the efficiency of testing process. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), a nature inspired optimization technique has wide range of applications in the field of software engineering. This paper presents an ACO based technique for test case selection for interaction testing of reusable software components.