Critical components identification and verification for effective software test prioritization

Nowadays, software complexity increases as the number of components in a component based system (CBS) increases. As the complexity level increases, the testing and verification of components also increases. This in turn rose up the testing time and cost which thus made industries to skip off some of the components due to the hard timeline and resource limitations especially during maintenance. This leads to hazardous effects if some of these missed components are critical in term of their core functionality and dependability with other components. Hence, a regression testing which is usually performed during maintenance phase should be developed meticulously to identify and test these critical components rigorously before releasing the software on to the customer side. This paper proposed a novel regression testing method based on the criticality measure calculated by means of dependability metrics and internal complexity metrics. Also, this paper compares the performance of the proposed approach with existing approaches and concluded that the proposed framework outperforms them.