Improving Fault Detection Capability by Selectively Retaining Test Cases during Test Suite Reduction

Software testing is a critical part of software development. As new test cases are generated over time due to software modifications, test suite sizes may grow significantly. Because of time and resource constraints for testing, test suite minimization techniques are needed to remove those test cases from a suite that, due to code modifications over time, have become redundant with respect to the coverage of testing requirements for which they were generated. Prior work has shown that test suite minimization with respect to a given testing criterion can significantly diminish the fault detection effectiveness (FDE) of suites. We present a new approach for test suite reduction that attempts to use additional coverage information of test cases to selectively keep some additional test cases in the reduced suites that are redundant with respect to the testing criteria used for suite minimization, with the goal of improving the FDE retention of the reduced suites. We implemented our approach by modifying an existing heuristic for test suite minimization. Our experiments show that our approach can significantly improve the FDE of reduced test suites without severely affecting the extent of suite size reduction