Semantic Annotation and Retrieval Approach for Historical Testcases

Abstract

Reusing Historical testcases play a crucial role in ensuring software testing quality. However, the diversity of historical testcases limits their potential uses. As a result, large amounts of human effort is required to write testcases for complex functional testings. In this paper, an effective framework is proposed to integrate and retrieve historical testcase bases with semantic analysis technologies. Firstly, semantic similarity is calculated to integrate the metadata of the inputted semi-structured testcases. Then, testcases are clustered by using similarity measures to eliminate heterogeneity existed in the contents of the testcases. The clustering results are added to the testcases as semantic annotations for the later semantic query. Using the semantic query interface, testers can easily obtain useful testcases without ambiguity. Finally, a case study demonstrates the effectiveness and scalability of this method for testcases retrieval for bank information systems testing.