Prioritizing tests for fault localization

Abstract

Maritime Safety and Security Systems of Systems (MSS SoS) evolve dynamically during operation, i.e., at runtime. After each runtime evolution, the quality assurance of the integrated system of systems has to be verified again. It is therefore necessary to devise an appropriate verification strategy that not only achieves this goal, but also minimizes the cost, e.g., time, resources, disruption, of checking after each modification. During testing, test prioritization techniques heuristically select test cases to minimize the time to detect the presence of a fault. However, this obviates that once a fault has been detected, it must be localized and isolated/repaired. Test suites prioritized for fault detection can reduce the amount of useful information for fault localization, increasing the cost of fault localization, e.g., with respect to randomly chosen tests. In this chapter we introduce fault localization prioritization and two new test case prioritization heuristics that greatly reduce the cost of fault localization (up to 80%) with almost no increase on the fault detection cost. Â(c) 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York. All rights are reserved.