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Selected publications by date
Selected publications by category
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An Empirical Study of the Effects of Minimization on the
Fault-Detection Capabilities of Test Suites
Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance
November 1998, pp. 34--43
Gregg Rothermel, Mary Jean Harrold, Jeffrey Ostrin, and Christie Hong
Abstract
Test suite minimization techniques attempt to reduce
the cost of saving and reusing tests during software
maintenance, by eliminating redundant tests from test suites.
A potential drawback of these techniques is that in
minimizing a test suite, they might reduce the ability
of that test suite to reveal faults in the software.
A recent study showed that minimization can reduce
test suite size without significantly reducing the
fault detection capabilities of test suites.
To further investigate this issue, we performed an
experiment in which we compared the costs and benefits
of minimizing test suites of various sizes for several programs.
In contrast to the previous study, our results reveal
that the fault-detection capabilities of test suites
can be severely compromised by minimization.
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