Model-based diversity-driven learn-to-rank test case prioritization

Abstract

Model-based Test Case Prioritization utilizing similarity metrics has proved effective in software testing. However, the utility of similarity metrics in it varies with test scenarios, hindering its universal effectiveness and performance optimization. To tackle this problem, we propose a Diversity-driven Learn-to-rank model-based TCP approach, named DLTCP, for optimizing early fault detection performance. Our method first employs the whale optimization algorithm to search for a suitable set of similarity metrics from a pool of existing candidates. This search process determines which metrics should be used. According to each selected metric, test cases are then prioritized. The resulting test case rankings are used as the training data for DLTCP. Finally, the proposed method incorporates random forest to train a ranking model for test case prioritization. As such, it can fuse multiple similarity metrics to improve the TCP performance. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our method’s performance using the average percentage fault detected (APFD) as metric. The experimental results show that DLTCP achieve an average APFD value of 0.953 for seven classic benchmark models, which is 11.37% higher than that of the state-of-the-art algorithms. It can well select a set of similarity metrics for effective fusion, demonstrating competitive performance in early fault detection.