Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, Chung Yuan Christian University, Chung Li, Taiwan

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Abstract—The topic of test case prioritization has been researched extensively in the past decade. However, current researches carried out on test case prioritization are mainly concerned with independent test cases in a structural testing environment. In a specification-based testing environment, however, some test cases are inter-case dependent and must follow certain sequences of execution. The objective of this research is to propose "prioritizing factors" that better reflect the real-world scenario for test case prioritization in the specification-based environment: (1) requirement severity score and (2) inter-case dependency, and to optimize the test case arrangement through the application of meta-heuristics. The inter-case dependency can be formulated as a sequential ordering problem (SOP), a NPcomplete problem for which the precedence relationship exists. Two meta-heuristics, the Genetic Algorithm and Ant Colony Optimization, are used to prioritize the test cases.

Index Terms—Specification-based testing, test case prioritization, inter-case dependency, Maximum Partial Ordering/Arbitrary Insertion, Ant Colony Optimization, Genetic Algorithm

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Cite: Gary Yu-Hsin Chen, Pei-Qi Wang, "Test Case Prioritization in a Specification-based Testing Environment," Journal of Software vol. 9, no. 8, pp. 2056-2064, 2014.