Methods for Test Suite Selection in the Process of Software Maintenance

Software maintenance is one of the essential processes of Software Development Life Cycle. The main ideas of maintaining software concern the correction of errors, the modification of codes, the prevention of future errors, and the improvement in executing time. While the modification has been implementing, the software system has to be retested to increase a level of confidence that it will be organized due to the requirements specification. At this point, a test suite needs to be designed for testing the modified modules and the entire software. A concept of the test suite selection is being developed by regression test selections such as the retest-all selections, a random or ad-hoc selection and the test suite minimization. Those selection techniques apply a mapping between the test cases in a test suite and the lines of code it executes. However, there are not only the lines of code as one of the factors that can affect the size of test suite but including the number of functions and faulty versions. Therefore, the method for test suite selection is proposed in order to cover those three factors by the integral technique which can produce the smaller size of a test suite when compared with the traditional regression selection techniques.