Prioritising test cases to improve the software fault detection using MCDM methods

Abstract

To decrease the cost of software testing, we can run a subset of test cases, but this may result in residual faults. To keep the efficiency of testing, the most important test cases should be selected through a prioritisation approach. Such prioritisation requires the assessment of different criteria, so it can be formulated as a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. This research proposes an approach to select the proper subset of test cases using the MCDM methods. Three MCDM methods, namely, fuzzy SAW, fuzzy VIKOR, and fuzzy TOPSIS are applied to prioritise the test cases concerning various criteria. To select a subset of test cases, a threshold is determined for different pairs of the most important criteria. The proposed approach is applied to an actual e-government software system with two variants. The experimental evaluations indicate the efficiency of this approach with respect to both the failure rate and the average percentage of fault detection metrics.