Revisiting Test-Case Prioritization on Long-Running Test Suites

Runxiang Cheng, Shuai Wang, Reyhaneh Jabbarvand, Darko Marinov

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

Abstract

The prolonged continuous integration (CI) runs are affecting timely feedback to software developers. Test-case prioritization (TCP) aims to expose faults sooner by reordering tests such that the ones more likely to fail are run earlier. TCP is thus especially important for long-running test suites. While many studies have explored TCP, they are based on outdated CI builds from over 10 years ago with test suites that last several minutes, or builds from inaccessible, proprietary projects. In this paper, we present LRTS, the first dataset of long-running test suites, with 21,255 CI builds and 57,437 test-suite runs from 10 large-scale, open-source projects that use Jenkins CI. LRTS spans from 2020 to 2023, with an average test-suite run duration of 6.5 hours. On LRTS, we study the effectiveness of 59 leading TCP techniques, the impact of confounding test failures on TCP, and TCP for failing tests with no prior failures. We revisit prior key findings (9 confirmed, 2 refuted) and establish 3 new findings. Our results show that prioritizing faster tests that recently failed performs the best, outperforming the sophisticated techniques.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationISSTA 2024 - Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
EditorsMaria Christakis, Michael Pradel
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages615-627
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9798400706127
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 11 2024
Event33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ISSTA 2024 - Vienna, Austria
Duration: Sep 16 2024Sep 20 2024

Publication series

NameISSTA 2024 - Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

Conference

Conference33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ISSTA 2024
Country/TerritoryAustria
CityVienna
Period9/16/249/20/24

Keywords

  • regression testing
  • reliability
  • Software testing
  • test prioritization

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Software

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Revisiting Test-Case Prioritization on Long-Running Test Suites'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this