Improving the effectiveness of test suite through mining historical data

Software regression testing is an integral part of most major software projects. As projects grow larger and the number of tests increases, performing regression testing becomes more costly. If software engineers can identify and run tests that are more likely to detect failures during regression testing, they may be able to better manage their regression testing activities. In this paper, to help identify such test cases, we developed techniques that utilizes various types of information in software repositories. To assess our techniques, we conducted an empirical study using an industrial software product, Microsoft Dynamics AX, which contains real faults. Our results show that the proposed techniques can be effective in identifying test cases that are likely to detect failures.