A New Code Based Test Case Prioritization Technique

Test Cases are treated as one of the most important part of software testing activity. They are responsible for the validation of the software under inspection. Test suites are also used to test changes in the source code during regression testing. In number of cases, the test suites are so big that executing all tests for every source code change is absurd. Developers/testers need to prioritize the test suite so that most beneficial test cases are executed first. This can result in increasing the effectiveness of testing and saving a lot of time and cost. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm for test case prioritization that is based on the code coverage of the test cases. The test cases that cover maximum part of the code are considered more valuable. We applied this new algorithm to a case study. The results are very effective and promising.