Test Case Prioritization for Audit Testing of Evolving Web Services Using Information Retrieval Techniques

Web services evolve frequently to meet new business demands and opportunities. However, service changes may affect service compositions that are currently consuming the services. Hence, audit testing (a form of regression testing in charge of checking for compatibility issues) is needed. As service compositions are often in continuous operation and the external services have limited (expensive) access when invoked for testing, audit testing has severe time and resources constraints, which make test prioritization a crucial technique (only the highest priority test cases will be executed).This paper presents a novel approach to the prioritization of audit test cases using information retrieval. This approach matches a service change description with the code portions exercised by the relevant test cases. So, test cases are prioritized based on their relevance to the service change. We evaluate the proposed approach on a system that composes services from eBay and Google.