Effectiveness of prioritization of test cases based on Faults

Regression testing (RT) is an expensive activity. It is applied on a modified program to enhance confidence and reliability by ensuring that the changes are accurately true and have not affected the unmodified portions of the SUT. Due to limited resources, it is not practical to re-run each test cases (TC). To improve the regression testing's effectiveness, the TCs should be arranged according to some objective function or criteria. Test case prioritization (TCP) arranges TCs in an order for execution that enhances their effectiveness by satisfying some testing goals. The highest priority assigned to TCs must execute before the TCs with low priority by virtue of some performance goal. Numerous goals are possible to achieve of which one such goal is rate of fault detection (RFT) in which the faults are surfaced as quickly as possible within the testing process. In this paper, a novel technique is suggested to prioritize the TCs that increase its effectiveness in detecting faults. The effectiveness of the proposed method is compared and matched with other prioritization approaches with the help of Average Percentage of Fault Detection (APFD) metric from which charts have been prepared.