Addressing the Regression Test Problem with Change

Authors: Andrew V Jones

Publish Date: 2016/6/13

Volume: , Issue: , Pages: 61-77

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Abstract

The regression test selection problem—selecting a subset of a testsuite given a change—has been studied widely over the past two decades However the problem has seen little attention when constrained to highcriticality developments and where a “safe” selection of tests need to be chosen Further no practical approaches have been presented for the programming language Ada In this paper we introduce an approach to solving the selection problem given a combination of both static and dynamic data for a program and a changeset We present a change impact analysis for Ada that selects the safe set of tests that need to be reexecuted to ensure no regressions We have implemented the approach in the commercial unittesting tool VectorCAST and validated it on a number of opensource examples On an example of a fullyfunctioning Ada implementation of a DNS server Ironsides the experimental results show a 97 reduction in testcase execution

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