a study of relative redundancy in test-suite reduction while retaining or improving fault-localization effectiveness
Test-suite reduction technique aims to find a subset of the test suite while still satisfying the original test requirements; therefore, it can save the cost of software testing. Because many test cases have been removed, the testing information is also lost. Fault localization is a technique using testing information to locate the fault and widely used by programmers to debug programs, so it suffers from the side effects of test-suite reduction. How to reduce the test-suite size in software testing with the premise of retaining or improving fault-localization effectiveness has become the hot spot in the area of software debugging recently. In this paper, we propose a new approach that selectively keeps the limited redundant test cases in the reduced set; it makes the new reduced set relatively redundant compared to the original one, and we expect that it retains or even improves fault-localization effectiveness. We also describe a framework that implements our approach and conduct a set of empirical studies for evaluation. The results show that our approach can retain or even improve fault-localization effectiveness as expected.
test-suite reduction fault localization