Multilevel coarse-to-fine-grained prioritization for GUI and web applications

Abstract

This work demonstrates that the use of one criterion for test suite prioritization may lead to high variability of fault detection rates due to random tie-breaking. The paper provides motivational examples of how a single fine-grained or coarse criterion may lead to poor code coverage or fault finding efficiency. We use a multilevel coarse-to-fine-grained two-way prioritization method to address the issues and evaluate the technique in an empirical study by comparing fault finding effectiveness and its variability to single-criterion methods. The results indicate that the proposed method decreases tie-breaking instability of the fault detection rate and often increases the overall performance of test suite prioritization methods.