Towards Test Focus Selection for Integration Testing using Method Level Software Metrics

The aim of integration testing is to uncover errors in the interactions between system modules. However, it is generally impossible to test all the interactions between modules because of time and cost constraints. Thus, it is important to focus the testing on the connections presumed to be more error-prone. The goal of this research is to guide quality assurance team wherein a software system to focus when they perform integration testing to save time and resources. In this work, we use method level metrics that capture both dependencies and internal complexity of methods. In addition, we build a tool that calculates the metrics automatically. We also propose an approach to select the test focus in integration testing. The main goal is to reduce the number of test cases needed while still detecting at least 80% of integration errors. We conducted an experimental study on several Java applications taken from different domains. Error seeding technique have been used for evaluation. The experimental results showed that our proposed approach is very effective for selecting the test focus in integration testing. It reduces considerably the number of required test cases while at the same time detects at least 80% of integration errors.