|
Selected publications by date
Selected publications by category
|
|   |
Experiments to Assess the Cost-Benefits of Test-Suite Reduction
Technical Report GIT-CC-99-29, Georgia Institute of Technology (Also Technical Report 99-60-9, Oregon State University) December 1999
Gregg Rothermel, Mary Jean Harrold, Jeff von Ronne, Christie Hong, Jeff Ostrin
Abstract
Test-suite reduction techniques attempt to reduce the cost of saving and reusing test cases during software maintenance by eliminating redundant test cases from test suites.
A potential drawback of these techniques is that in reducing a test suite they might reduce the ability of that test suite to reveal faults in the software. Previous studies
suggested that test-suite reduction techniques can reduce test suite size without significantly reducing the fault-detection capabilities of test suites. To further investigate this
issue we performed experiments in which we examined the costs and benefits of reducing test suites of various sizes for several programs and investigated factors that
influence those costs and benefits. In contrast to the previous studies, our results reveal that the fault-detection capabilities of test suites can be severely compromised by
test-suite reduction.
|