Empirical studies of a decentralized regression test selection framework for web services

Abstract

As Web services grow in popularity and use, it is becoming more important for organizations to verify their evolving services to ensure that they are providing a desired level of confidence and one of the most common ways to perform this verification is regression testing. Safe regression test selection techniques are often employed in conjunction with regression testing to reduce the associated costs of testing without reducing the level of confidence provided. In a previous work, a framework which automates the safe regression test selection and regression testing processes was developed in a decentralized, end-to-end manner. This paper reports an empirical study of the framework designed to compare the cost of performing the proposed approach and running the selected tests with the cost of running all tests without performing a selection step. The results indicate that the framework can be effective in reducing the costs of performing regression test selection.