An Approach to Test Case Design for Cost Effective Regression Testing

摘要

Regression testing is a vital and expensive activity that occupies a large portion of the software maintenance budget Cost of regression testing would affect the cost benefit trade-off of a development organization. Any reduction in the cost of regression testing would help to reduce the software maintenance cost Current research is focused on finding the ways to reduce the regression testing cost In this paper, an approach to test suite reduction for regression testing in black box environment has been proposed. This type of approach has not been used earlier. The reduced regression test suite has the same bug finding capability and covers same functionality as the original regression test suite. The proposed approach is applied on four real-time case studies. It is found that the reduction in cost of regression testing is ranging between 29 and 36 percent Since regression testing is done more frequently in software maintenance phase, the regression testing cost can be reduced considerably by applying the proposed approach.