Supporting Continuous Integration by Code-Churn Based Test Selection

Continuous integration promises advantages in large-scale software development by enabling software development organizations to deliver new functions faster. However, implementing continuous integration in large software development organizations is challenging because of organizational, social and technical reasons. One of the technical challenges is the ability to rapidly prioritize the test cases which can be executed quickly and trigger the most failures as early as possible. In our research we propose and evaluate a method for selecting a suitable set of functional regression tests on system level. The method is based on analysis of correlations between test-case failures and source code changes and is evaluated by combining semi-structured interviews and workshops with practitioners at Ericsson and Axis Communications in Sweden. The results show that using measures of precision and recall, the test cases can be prioritized. The prioritization leads to finding an optimal test suite to execute before the integration.