Call stack coverage for test suite reduction

Abstract

Test suite reduction is an important test maintenance activity that attempts to reduce the size of a test suite with respect to some criteria. Emerging trends in software development such as component reuse, multi-language implementations, and stringent performance requirements present new challenges for existing reduction techniques that may limit their applicability. A test suite reduction technique that is not affected by these challenges is presented; it is based on dynamically generated language-independent information that can be collected with little run-time overhead. Specifically, test cases from the suite being reduced are executed on the application under test and the call stacks produced during execution are recorded. These call stacks are then used as a coverage requirement in a test suite reduction algorithm. Results of experiments on test suites for the space antenna-steering application show significant reduction in test suite size at the cost of a moderate loss in fault detection effectiveness.