Empirical Software Engineering
Tool support for randomized unit testing
Proceedings of the 1st international workshop on Random testing
Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
Modeling consumer-perceived web application fault severities for testing
Proceedings of the 19th international symposium on Software testing and analysis
The use of mutation in testing experiments and its sensitivity to external threats
Proceedings of the 2011 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
Regression testing minimization, selection and prioritization: a survey
Software Testing, Verification & Reliability
Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Systems: Testing, Analysis, and Debugging
Object-Oriented testing capabilities and performance evaluation of the c# mutation system
CEE-SET'09 Proceedings of the 4th IFIP TC 2 Central and East European conference on Advances in Software Engineering Techniques
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Regression testing is an important part of software maintenance, but it can also be very expensive. To reduce this expense, software testers may prioritize their test cases so that those that are more important are run earlier in the regression testing process. Previous work has shown that prioritization can improve a test suiteýs rate of fault detection, but the assessment of prioritization techniques has been limited to hand-seeded faults, primarily due to the belief that such faults are more realistic than automatically generated (mutation) faults. A recent empirical study, however, suggests that mutation faults can be representative of real faults. We have therefore designed and performed a controlled experiment to assess the ability of prioritization techniques to improve the rate of fault detection techniques, measured relative to mutation faults. Our results show that prioritization can be effective relative to the faults considered, and they expose ways in which that effectiveness can vary with characteristics of faults and test suites. We also compare our results to those collected earlier with respect to the relationship between hand-seeded faults and mutation faults, and the implications this has for researchers performing empirical studies of prioritization.