Revealing influence of model structure and test case profile on the prioritization of test cases in the context of model-based testing

Abstract

Background

Test case prioritization techniques aim at defining an order of test cases that favor the achievement of a goal during test execution, such as revealing failures as earlier as possible. A number of techniques have already been proposed and investigated in the literature and experimental results have discussed whether a technique is more successful than others. However, in the context of model-based testing, only a few attempts have been made towards either proposing or experimenting test case prioritization techniques. Moreover, a number of factors that may influence on the results obtained still need to be investigated before more general conclusions can be reached.;

Methods

In order to evaluate factors that potentially affect the performance of test case prioritization techniques, we perform three empirical studies, an exploratory one and two experiments. The first study focus on expose the techniques to a common and fair environment, since the investigated techniques have never been studied together, and observe their behavior. The following two experiments aim at observing the effects of two factors: the structure of the model and the profile of the test cases that fail. We designed the experiments using the one-factor-at-a-time strategy.;