Improving the Effectiveness of Software Testing through Test Case Reduction

Authors: R. P. Mahapatra, Jitendra Singh

Abstract:

This paper proposes a new technique for improving the efficiency of software testing, which is based on a conventional attempt to reduce test cases that have to be tested for any given software. The approach utilizes the advantage of Regression Testing where fewer test cases would lessen time consumption of the testing as a whole. The technique also offers a means to perform test case generation automatically. Compared to one of the techniques in the literature where the tester has no option but to perform the test case generation manually, the proposed technique provides a better option. As for the test cases reduction, the technique uses simple algebraic conditions to assign fixed values to variables (Maximum, minimum and constant variables). By doing this, the variables values would be limited within a definite range, resulting in fewer numbers of possible test cases to process. The technique can also be used in program loops and arrays.

Keywords: Software Testing, Test Case Generation, Test CaseReduction

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1332736

References:

[1] B. Beizer. "Software Testing Techniques." Van Nostrand Reinhold, 2nd edition, 1990.
[2] B. Korel, "Automated Software Test Data Generation," Conference on Software Engineering, Vol 10, No. 8, pages 870-879, August 1990.
[3] L. A. Clarke, "A System to Generate Test Data and Symbolically Execute Programs," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. SE-2, No. 3, pages 215-222, September 1976.
[4] L. J. Morell. "A Theory of Error-Based Testing," PhD thesis, University of Maryland, College Park MD, 1984, Technical Report TR-1395
[5] M. J. Gallagher and V. L. Narsimhan, "ADTEST: A Test Data Generation Suite for Ada Software Systems," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 23, No. 8, pages 473-484, August 1997.
[6] Neelam Gupta, A. P. Mathur and M. L. Soffa, "Automated Test Data Generation using An Iterative Relaxation Method," ACM SIGSOFT Sixth International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE-6), pages 231-244, Orlando, Florida, November 1998.
[7] Offutt A. Jefferson, J. Pan and J. M. Voas. "Procedures for Reducing the Size of Coverage-based Test.