Research Of Test Suite Minimization Algorithm

Software testing is one of the very important parts in the process of software development. With the growing of software, the time, energy and materials spending on testing software are also increasing. The amount of test suite determines the cost and efficiency of the software testing. In the assurance of quality and on the premise of fully tested the key operating of the software, how to use a minimum number of test cases to test software fully then to lower the cost and to raise test efficiency is the key point in this paper.On the base of summering and analyzing the existed methods to test suite reduction, the paper gave a Test Suite Minimization method to generate optimal representative set which can also get the optimal representative set without change the original problem to 0-1 integer programming comparing with the integer programming methods. Furthermore, this paper has also proved the correction of the new method, and has given some examples of its application. To verify the result, on the development environment of Visual C++ 6.0, we designed a tool that implement the reduction algorithm based on the test requirements, and compared the results with the other algorithms.The orthogonal experiment design method is a scientific one which is used to search for the best (or better) experimental scheme. In the software reliability testing, the testing cost increases rapidly with the increasing of the input numbers or operation numbers. To this problem, we presented a test suite minimization algorithm for software reliability testing which can firstly use orthogonal design method to get an original test suite, and then use reduction methods based on the test requirements to generating the final test suite. Examples showed that this method simplified the test suite and thus greatly reduced the cost of software reliability testing.