Regression Testing and Test Selection
Tao Xie
Abstract

A test case consists of two parts: a test input to exercise the
program under test and a test oracle to check the correctness of the
test execution. A test oracle is often in the form of executable
assertions such as in the JUnit testing framework. Manually generated
test cases are valuable in exposing program faults in the current
program version or regression faults in future program
versions. However, manually generated test cases are often
insufficient for assuring high software quality.We can then use an
existing test-generation tool to generate new test inputs to augment
the existing test suite. However, without specifications these
automatically generated test inputs often do not have test oracles for
exposing faults. We have developed an automatic approach for
augmenting an automatically generated unit-test suite with regression
oracle checking. The augmented test suite has an improved capability
of guarding against regression faults. We have also developed several
test selection approaches for selecting the most valuable subset of
generated test inputs for inspection and equip them with test
oracles. The selected tests have a high probability of exposing faults
or failures, or exposing special behavior of the program under test.

Bio: Tao Xie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer
Science at North Carolina State University. He received his Ph.D. in
Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2005, advised by
David Notkin, an M.S. in Computer Science from Peking University in
2000, advised by Hong Mei, and a B.S. in Computer Science from Fudan
University in 1997. His research interests are in software
engineering, with an emphasis on automated software testing and
verification, mining software engineering data, software security
testing and analysis, testing and analysis of aspect-oriented
programs, testing and analysis of web services and applications,
software evolution, and program comprehension. He has served on
program committees of ASE 2006/2007, ISSRE 2006, and AOSD 2007 as well
as a number of international conferences and workshops. Besides doing
research, he has contributed to understanding the software engineering
research community.

Home page: http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/xie/