TOOL DEVELOPMENT FOR TEST OPTIMIZATION PURPOSES

Abstract: Background: Software testing is a crucial part of the system's development life-cycle, which pays off in detecting flaws and defects, alternatively leading to high-quality products. Generally, software testing is performed manually by a human operator or automatically. While many test cases are written and executed, the testing process checks if all the requirements are covered, and the system exhibits the expected behavior. A great portion of the cost and time of the software development is spent on testing; therefore, considering the type of the software, test optimization is needed and presented as a solution in cost efficiency and time-saving. Aim: This thesis aims to propose and evaluate the improved sOrTES+ tool for test optimization purposes, consisting of selection, prioritization, and scheduling of the test cases integrated into a dynamic user interface. Method: In this thesis, test optimization is addressed in two aspects, low-level requirements and high-level requirements. Our solution analyzes these requirements to detect the dependencies between test cases. Thus, we propose sOrTES+, a tool that uses three different scheduling techniques: Greedy, Greedy DO(direct output), and Greedy TO(total output) for test optimization. The mentioned techniques are integrated into a dynamic user interface that allows testers to manage their projects, see useful information about test cases and requirements, store the executed test cases while scheduling the remaining ones for execution, and also switch between the mentioned scheduling techniques regarding the project requirements. Finally, we demonstrated its applicability and compared our tool with existing testing techniques used by our industrial partner, Alstom company, evaluating the efficiency in terms of requirement coverage and troubleshooting time. Results: Our comparison shows that our solution improves the requirement coverage, increasing it by 26.4% while decreasing the troubleshooting time by 6%. Conclusion: Based on our results, we conclude that our proposed tool, sOrTES+, can be used for test optimization and it performs more efficiently than the existing methods used by industrial partner Alstom company.