Priorização de testes de sistema automatizados por meio de grafos de chamadas

Abstract

With the increasing need to streamline the delivery of new developments to the customer and reduce application development time, test case prioritization allows a quicker detection of faults present in the application through the ordering of test cases to be executed. Besides that, a quicker detection enables also the correction of these faults to start as soon as possible. However, when the test cases to be prioritized are automated system tests, traditional criteria used in the literature like code coverage or system models become uninteresting, given that this type of test case, classified as black box test, ignores how the application was coded or modeled. Considering the hypothesis that bigger automated test cases verify more parts of the application and that similar test cases may be testing the same application areas, it seems valid to believe that giving a higher priority to more complex test cases to be executed first can accomplish positive results when compared to the unordered execution of test cases. It is on this scenario that this project studies the usage of call graphs from test cases as the criterion to prioritize them, increasing the priority of the execution of test cases with the higher number of nodes on the graph. The approach proposed in this document showed through two case studies that it is capable of improving fault detection rate compared to unordered test cases. Furthermore, the proposed approach achieved similar results when compared to a traditional prioritization approach using code coverage of the application.