An extensive study of static regression test selection in modern software evolution

Owolabi Legunsen, Farah Hariri, August Shi, Yafeng Lu, Lingming Zhang, Darko Marinov

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Regression test selection (RTS) aims to reduce regression testing time by only re-running the tests affected by code changes. Prior research on RTS can be broadly split into dy-namic and static techniques. A recently developed dynamic RTS technique called Ekstazi is gaining some adoption in practice, and its evaluation shows that selecting tests at a coarser, class-level granularity provides better results than selecting tests at a finer, method-level granularity. As dy-namic RTS is gaining adoption, it is timely to also evaluate static RTS techniques, some of which were proposed over three decades ago but not extensively evaluated on modern software projects. This paper presents the first extensive study that evalu-ates the performance benefits of static RTS techniques and their safety; a technique is safe if it selects to run all tests that may be affected by code changes. We implemented two static RTS techniques, one class-level and one method-level, and compare several variants of these techniques. We also compare these static RTS techniques against Ek-stazi, a state-of-The-Art, class-level, dynamic RTS technique. The experimental results on 985 revisions of 22 open-source projects show that the class-level static RTS technique is comparable to Ekstazi, with similar performance benefits, but at the risk of being unsafe sometimes. In contrast, the method-level static RTS technique performs rather poorly.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationFSE 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering
EditorsZhendong Su, Thomas Zimmermann, Jane Cleland-Huang
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages583-594
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781450342186
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 1 2016
Event24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, FSE 2016 - Seattle, United States
Duration: Nov 13 2016Nov 18 2016

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
Volume13-18-November-2016

Other

Other24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, FSE 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeattle
Period11/13/1611/18/16

Keywords

  • Class firewall
  • Regression test selection
  • Static analysis

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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