Test Case Selection Method for Emergency Changes

Software testing is an expensive task that significantly contributes to the total cost of a software development project. Among the many strategies available to test a software project, the creation of automated test cases that can be enacted after building a release or resolving a defect is increasingly used in the industry. However, certain defects found in the system operation may block major business operations. These critical defects are sometimes resolved directly in the production environment under such a restricted deadline that there is not enough time to run the complete set of automated test cases upon the patched version of the software. Declining to run the test case suite allows a quicker release of the software to production, but also allows other defects to be introduced into the system. This paper presents a heuristic approach to select test cases that might support emergency changes aiming to maximize the coverage and diversity of the testing activity under a strict time constraint and given the priority of the features that were changed.