Arranging software test cases through an optimization method

During the software testing process, the customers would be invited to review or inspect an ongoing software product. This phase is called the “in-plant” test, often known as an “alpha” test. Typically, this test phase lasts for a very short period of time in which the software test engineers or software quality engineers rush to execute a list of software test cases in the test suite with customers. Because of the time constraint, the test cases have to be arranged in terms of test case severities, estimated test time, and customers´ demands. As important as the test case arrangement is, this process is mostly performed manually by the project managers and software test engineers together. As the software systems are getting more sophisticated and complex, a greater volume of test cases have to be generated, and the manual arrangement approach may not be the most efficient way to handle this. In this paper, we propose a framework for automating the process of test case arrangement and management through an optimization method. We believe that this framework will help software test engineers facing with the challenges of prioritizing test cases.