Novel Fuzzy Clustering Methods for Test Case Prioritization in Software Projects

Abstract

Systematic Regression Testing is essential for maintaining software quality, but the cost of regression testing is high. Test case prioritization (TCP) is a widely used approach to reduce this cost. Many researchers have proposed regression test case prioritization techniques, and clustering is one of the popular methods for prioritization. The task of selecting appropriate test cases and identifying faulty functions involves ambiguities and uncertainties. To alleviate the issue, in this paper, two fuzzy-based clustering techniques are proposed for TCP using newly derived similarity coefficient and dominancy measure. Proposed techniques adopt grouping technology for clustering and the Weighted Arithmetic Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS) method for ranking. Initially, test cases are clustered using similarity//dominancy measures, which are later prioritized using the WASPAS method under both inter- and intra-perspectives. The proposed algorithms are evaluated using real-time data obtained from Software-artifact Infrastructure Repository (SIR). On evaluation, it is inferred that the proposed algorithms increase the likelihood of selecting more relevant test cases when compared to the recent state-of-the-art techniques. Finally, the strengths of the proposed algorithms are discussed in comparison with state-of-the-art techniques.