Test Selection for Unified Regression Testing

Shuai Wang, Xinyu Lian, Darko Marinov, Tianyin Xu

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

Abstract

Today's software failures have two dominating root causes: code bugs and misconfigurations. To combat failure-inducing software changes, unified regression testing (URT) is needed to synergistically test the changed code and all changed production configurations for deployment reliability. However, URT could incur high cost, as it needs to run a large number of tests under multiple configurations. Regression test selection (RTS) can reduce regression testing cost. Unfortunately, no existing RTS technique reasons about code and configuration changes collectively. We introduce Unified Regression Test Selection (uRTS) to effectively reduce the cost of URT. uRTS supports project changes on 1) code only, 2) configurations only, and 3) both code and configurations. It selects regular tests and configuration tests with a unified selection algorithm. The uRTS algorithm analyzes code and configuration dependencies of each test across runs and across configurations. uRTS provides the same safety guarantee as the state-of-the-art RTS while selecting fewer tests and, more importantly, reducing the end-to-end testing time. We implemented uRTS on top of Ekstazi (a RTS tool for code changes) and Ctest (a configuration testing framework). We evaluate uRTS on hundreds of code revisions and dozens of configurations of five large projects. The results show that uRTS reduces the end-to-end testing time, on average, by 3.64X compared to executing all tests and 1.87X compared to a competitive reference solution that directly extends RTS for URT.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2023
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages1687-1699
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781665457019
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
Event45th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2023 - Melbourne, Australia
Duration: May 15 2023May 16 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
ISSN (Print)0270-5257

Conference

Conference45th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2023
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityMelbourne
Period5/15/235/16/23

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Test Selection for Unified Regression Testing'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this