Adaptive Regression Testing Strategy: An Empirical Study

When software systems evolve, different amounts and types of code modifications can be involved in different versions. These factors can affect the costs and benefits of regression testing techniques in different ways, and thus, there may be no single regression testing technique that is the most cost-effective technique to use on every version. To date, many regression testing techniques have been proposed, but no research has been done on the problem of helping practitioners systematically choose appropriate techniques on new versions as systems evolve. To address this problem, we propose adaptive regression testing (ART) strategies that attempt to identify the regression testing techniques that will be the most cost-effective for each regression testing session considering organization's situations and testing environment. To assess our approach, we conducted an experiment focusing on test case prioritization techniques. Our results show that prioritization techniques selected by our approach can be more cost-effective than those used by the control approaches.