FastLane: Test Minimization for Rapidly Deployed Large-Scale Online Services

Abstract

Today, we depend on numerous large-scale services for basic operations such as email. These services, built on the basis of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) processes, are extremely dynamic: developers continuously commit code and introduce new features, functionality and fixes. Hundreds of commits may enter the code-base in a single day. Therefore one of the most time-critical, yet resource-intensive tasks towards ensuring code-quality is effectively testing such large code-bases. This paper presents FastLane, a system that performs data-driven test minimization. FastLane uses light-weight machine-learning models built upon a rich history of test and commit logs to predict test outcomes. Tests for which we predict outcomes need not be explicitly run, thereby saving us precious test-time and resources. Our evaluation on a large-scale email and collaboration platform service shows that our techniques can save 18.04%, i.e., almost a fifth of test-time while obtaining a test outcome accuracy of 99.99%.