TestFilter: A Statement-Coverage Based Test Case Reduction Technique

Software testing is an important but expensive phase of software development life cycle. During software testing and retesting, development organizations always desire to validate the software from different views. But exhaustive testing requires program execution with all possible combinations of values for program variables, which is impractical due to resource constraints. For many applications, it is possible to generate test cases automatically. But the core problem is the selection of effective test cases necessary to validate the program during the maintenance phase. This target can only be achieved by eliminating all the redundant test cases from the generated pool of test suites. In this paper, we propose a novel test case reduction technique called TestFilter that uses the statement-coverage criterion for reduction of test cases. To demonstrate the applicability of this approach, we conduct an experimental study. The results show that our technique is beneficial in identifying non-redundant test cases at a little cost. Ultimately it is beneficial to optimize time & cost spent on testing and it is also helpful during regression testing.