An Approach to Cost Effective Regression Testing in Black-Box Testing Environment

Regression testing is an expensive and frequently executed maintenance activity used to revalidate the modified software. As the regression testing is a frequently executed activity in the software maintenance phase, it occupies a large portion of the software maintenance budget. Any reduction in the cost of regression testing would help to reduce the software maintenance cost. The 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 the 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 for each regression testing cycle is ranging between 19.35 and 32.10 percent. Since regression testing is done more frequently in software maintenance phase, the overall software maintenance cost can be reduced considerably by applying the proposed approach.