Test scenario prioritization from user requirements for web-based software

Abstract

User requirements are the building blocks for development of software applications. User requirements decide the width and breadth of any software. Nowadays, test scenarios are prepared from the user requirements, which give the test engineers ample scope to review the test plan thoroughly before doing software testing. Regression testing is carried out to know the effect of requirement changes on the functionalities and performance of the software. Test scenario prioritization, which is one of the techniques to perform regression testing, maximizes the ease of debugging for the system under test. The code based test scenario prioritization and model based test scenario prioritization have their own limitations. So, to achieve ease of debugging and to get more time for reviewing the test plans, researchers are now working on test scenario prioritization using requirements collected from the end users. In this paper, we propose an approach named Requirement based test scenario prioritization to prioritize test scenarios using requirements collected from end users for developing software applications. The user’s functional requirements are collected and is assigned with some weight depending upon different factors like complexity of implementing the requirements, type of release of the requirements, requirement volatility, coupling between requirements etc. Test scenarios are generated from requirements collected from the end users. Then, the final priority weight of each test scenario is found out by considering the weight of each requirement covered by the corresponding test scenario and the percentage of requirements coverage made by each test scenario. The test scenarios are prioritized based on the final priority weight. The proposed approach is evaluated using average percentage of fault detection metric and is found to be very efficient in early test scenario prioritization and detection of faults.