Patent ID: 7506312

Claim:
A method of automatically determining risk areas to retest directly from work artifacts, said method comprising: defining risk failure attributes and criteria in an extensible markup language format for work artifacts in a software development environment; assigning risk failure tolerances or thresholds to said risk failure attributes and criteria; a quality management system producing a risk failure policy by combining said risk failure attributes and criteria and said risk failure tolerances or thresholds; assigning risk failure scores to test cases, based on said risk failure policy; selecting and applying said risk failure policy to said test cases for a test pass; automatically selecting said test cases for execution by filtering and setting constraints, based on application of said risk failure policy; automatically ordering said test cases, based on said risk failure scores per said test pass; automatically generating a test suite dynamically, from pool of said test cases, based on application of said risk failure policy; providing reports indicating said risk failure scores for said test cases; analyzing said risk failure scores of past test cases and actual test execution result; providing a first user-interface to create and modify said risk failure attributes and criteria and said risk failure tolerances or thresholds; creating an initial ordered set of said test cases for said quality management system, to reorder, based on said risk failure scores of said past test cases; dynamically changing said risk failure scores, based on execution results in said test suite; dynamically selecting said test cases, by adding or subtracting a test case from said test cases via a display device; dynamically reordering said test cases; providing a second user-interface to dynamically provide said risk failure scores and actual test results for said test cases during execution; and collecting and aggregating previous test runs associated with said test cases and forecasting a length of time and a range to run said test suite, wherein said forecasting step uses previous test rerun counts on a risk area to schedule and forecast a level of regression test effort.