Supervised Tie Breaking in Test Case Prioritization

Test case prioritization reorders sequences of test cases with the aim of increasing the rate at which faults can be detected. Most existing prioritization techniques employ coverage information gathered on previous test case executions to rank test cases. Existing studies in the literature, however, show that there is a high chance that "ties" occur during the prioritization procedure when using coverage-based techniques; that is, there is a high chance that cases will occur in which two or more candidate test cases have identical code coverage behaviors. To break such ties, most techniques resort to random re-ordering of test cases, which can degrade the rate of fault detection. In this work, we use an ensemble of defect prediction models to guide prioritization techniques towards breaking such ties by re-ordering test cases in terms of the likelihood that they will cover fault-prone units of code.