Abstract
Test-suite reduction targets to find a minimal subset of the test suite that is sufficient regarding specific test requirements. In general, test-suite reduction causes some kind of loss in the fault-detection ability of the reduced test suite. Cost-Effectiveness for test-suite reduction is only given if the trade-off between the savings in the testing effort and the resulting degradation in the fault-detection ability is reasonable. In this work we define a cost function, summarizing the beneficial output of a test suite depending on the test effort and the fault-detection ability. We apply this cost function to test suites that are defined by different commonly used coverage criteria, like MCC (multiple condition coverage), MC/DC (modified condition/decision coverage), and DC (decision coverage) and evaluate the cost function for a safety-relevant system from automotive. The results mainly demonstrate two fundamental aspects of test-suite reduction: First, the cost effectiveness is very sensitive to the assumed costs for the test-case execution and the penalty for undetected faults. Secondly, for non-safety-relevant systems test-suite reduction for DC is still cost effective, but this does not hold for safety-relevant systems. The cost effectiveness of test-suite reduction for safety-relevant systems for MCC and MC/DC is almost the same.
This work has been partially funded by the ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking and the National Funding Agency of Austria for the project VeTeSS under the funding ID ARTEMIS-2011-1-295311.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Please note that although the standard refers to safety-related systems we stick to the more popular term in automotive safety-relevant (also used by certification authorities, like TÜV SÜD).
References
H. Kopetz, Real-Time Systems: Design Principles for Distributed Embedded Applications, 2nd ed., ser. Series: Real-Time Systems Series. Springer, 2011.
M. J. Harrold, R. Gupta, and M. L. Soffa, “A methodology for controlling the size of a test suite,” ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol., vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 270–285, Jul. 1993. [Online]. Available: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/152388.152391
G. Rothermel, M. J. Harrold, J. von Ronne, and C. Hong, “Empirical studies of test-suite reduction,” Journal of Software Testing, Verification, and Reliability, vol. 12, pp. 219–249, 2002.
International Organization for Standardization, “ISO 26262: Road vehicles - functional safety,” 2009.
H. Leung and L. White, “A study of regression testing,” in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Software Engineering. USPDI, 1989.
W. E. Wong, J. R. Horgan, S. London, and A. P. Mathur, “Effect of test set minimization on fault detection effectiveness,” in Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Software engineering, ser. ICSE ’95. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 1995, pp. 41–50. [Online]. Available: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/225014.225018
E. Wong, J. R. Horgan, A. P. Mathur, and A. Pasquini, “Test set size minimization and fault detection effectiveness: A case study in a space application,” in In Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Computer Software & Applications Conference, 1997, pp. 522–528.
H. Zhong, L. Zhang, and H. Mei, “An experimental comparison of four test suite reduction techniques,” in Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering, ser. ICSE ’06. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2006, pp. 636–640. [Online]. Available: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1134285.1134380
T. Chen and M. Lau, “A new heuristic for test suite reduction,” Information and Software Technology, vol. 40, no. 56, pp. 347 – 354, 1998. [Online]. Available: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950584998000500
N. Mansour and K. El-Fakih, “Simulated annealing and genetic algorithms for optimal regression testing,” Journal of Software Maintenance, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 19–34, Jan. 1999. [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1096-908X(199901/02)11:1<19::AID-SMR182>3.0.CO;2-M
J. Black, E. Melachrinoudis, and D. Kaeli, “Bi-criteria models for all-uses test suite reduction,” in ICSE 2004. Proceedings. 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2004., 2004, pp. 106–115.
G. Fraser and F. Wotawa, “Redundancy based test-suite reduction,” in Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Fundamental approaches to software engineering, ser. FASE’07. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2007, pp. 291–305. [Online]. Available: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1759394.1759425
J. Jones and M. Harrold, “Test-suite reduction and prioritization for modified condition/decision coverage,” in Software Maintenance, 2001. Proceedings. IEEE International Conference on, pp. 92–101.
M. Staats, G. Gay, M. Whalen, and M. Heimdahl, “On the danger of coverage directed test case generation,” in Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, ser. FASE’12. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2012, pp. 409–424. [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28872-2_28
Z. Szűgyi and Z. Porkoláb, “Necessary test cases for decision coverage and modified condition / decision coverage,” Department of Programming Languages and Compilers, Eötvös Loránd University, 2002.
K. Kapoor and J. Bowen, “Experimental evaluation of the variation in effectiveness for DC, FPC and MC/DC test criteria,” Proceedings International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, ISESE 2003, pp. 185–194, Sept.-1 Oct. 2003.
Y. T. Yu and M. L. Laub, “A comparison of MC/DC, MUMCUT and several other coverage criteria for logical decisions,” Journal of Systems and Software, vol. 79, no. Issue 5, pp. 577–590, May 2006.
RTCA Inc., “DO-178B: Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification,” Requirements and Technical Concepts for Aviation, Washington, DC, December 1992.
RTCA Inc., “DO-248B: Final Report for Clarification of DO-178B: Software Considerations in Ariborne Systems and Equipment Certification,” Requirements and Technical Concepts for Aviation, Washington, DC, October 2001.
J. J. Chilenski, “An investigation of three forms of the modified condition decision coverage (MCDC) criterion,” U.S.Department of Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration, DOT/FAA/AR-01/18, April 2001.
S. Kandl and S. Chandrashekar, “Reasonability of MC/DC for safety-relevant software implemented in programming languages with short-circuit evaluation,” in Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Software Technologies for Future Embedded and Ubiquitous Systems (SEUS 2013). IEEE Proceedings, 2013, Paderborn, Deutschland.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kandl, S. (2015). Cost Effectiveness of Coverage-Guided Test-Suite Reduction for Safety-Relevant Systems. In: Selvaraj, H., Zydek, D., Chmaj, G. (eds) Progress in Systems Engineering. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 366. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08422-0_84
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08422-0_84
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-08421-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-08422-0
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)