Section: New Results

Test Case Selection in Industry: an Analysis of Issues Related to Static Approaches

Automatic testing constitutes an important part of everyday development practice. But running all these tests may take hours. This is especially true for large systems involving, for example, the deployment of a web server or communication with a database. For this reason, tests are not launched as often as they should be and are mostly run at night. The company wishes to improve its development and testing process by giving to developers rapid feedback after a change. An interesting solution to give developers rapid feedback after a change is to reduce the number of tests to run by identifying only those exercising the piece of code changed. Two main approaches are proposed in the literature: static and dynamic. We evaluate these approaches on three industrial, closed source, cases to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each solution. We also propose a classification of problems that may arise when trying to identify the tests that cover a method.