OTCP-ISVM: Online Test Case Prioritization Based on Incremental Support Vector Machine

As software development technology becomes increasingly mature, the challenge to software testing efficiency is also increasing. Giving developers faster feedback on their code is essential for developing software. Test Case Prioritization (TCP) is one of the most popular techniques to optimize software testing. However, most TCP techniques rely on coverage information extracted from source code or execution history obtained from past executions and cannot be applied to preliminary software testing. What’s more, offline TCP technology cannot provide timely feedback to testers, affecting testing efficiency. To address the problem, this paper proposes a novel online TCP technique based on Incremental Support Vector Machine, which is called OTCP-ISVM. OTCP-ISVM dynamically reprioritizes the test cases when new failures are detected by using support vectors from previous training round and adapting the segmentation hyperplane. We have evaluated OTCP-ISVM on a large-scale project. The experimental results showed that OTCP-ISVM can achieve dynamic prioritization of the test cases. Compared with SVM algorithm and random algorithm, the fault detection speed of OTCP-ISVM algorithm is improved by 22% and 14% respectively.