Tool Support For Test Case Selection In Regression Testing

Abstract

Software testing and retesting occurs continuously during the software development lifecycle to detect errors as early as possible. As the software evolves the size of test suites also grows. Due to limited resources, basic problem in regression testing is to select the important test cases from the available test suit. In this test case selection techniques unimportant test cases are discarded to save the time and resources. A number of techniques have been proposed for test case selection. Most of them are code based. So, they have not proved viable in all the situations. In this article we present an approach based on specifications. It uses classification tree method using classification tree editor tool. The classification-tree method provides a systematic way for software testers to derive test cases by considering important relevant aspects that are identified from the specification. The method has been used in many real-life applications and shown to be effective. The proposed approach is very effective to reduce manual effort in the generation and selection of test cases. We are using CTE XL tool for supporting this enhanced process which shows how to integrate weighting factors into classification trees which leads to automatic generation of selected test suites. CTE XL supports test case selection by occurrence probability, error probability, or risk because it is based on user requirements.