Modeling the Software Failure Correlations When Test Automation Is Adopted during the Software Development

Abstract

With the growing scale of software system, assuring software quality through automated testing becomes increasingly important. When automated testing is involved in software development, the uncertainty caused by automated test failures should not be ignored. Besides, the modification of tested software may introduce some potential faults and further invalidate some test scripts, which may lead to the failed outcomes. Based on the facts, we will propose a Markov renewal process (MRP) to model the correlation among software runs during the software development. The use of the proposed modeling framework is illustrated through an example. Compared to previous work, the proposed framework indeed addresses the influence of test automation and provides more useful information.