Test suite reduction analysis with enhanced tie-breaking techniques

Test suite minimization techniques try to remove redundant test cases of a test suite. However, reducing the size of a test suite might reduce its ability to reveal faults. Most of prior works which address this problem affect some extent of suite size reduction. In this paper, we present a novel approach for test suite reduction that uses additional testing criterion to break the ties in the minimization process. We performed an experiment with the Siemens suite subject programs. The experiment results show that, compared to existing approaches, the proposed approach can improve the fault detection effectiveness of reduced suites with negligible increase in the size of the suites. Besides, the proposed approach can also accelerate the process of minimization.