Ant Colony System With Sorting-Based Local Search for Coverage-Based Test Case Prioritization

Test case prioritization (TCP) is a popular regression testing technique in software engineering field. The task of TCP is to schedule the execution order of test cases so that certain objective (e.g., code coverage) can be achieved quickly. In this article, we propose an efficient ant colony system framework for the TCP problem, with the aim of maximizing the code coverage as soon as possible. In the proposed framework, an effective heuristic function is proposed to guide the ants to construct solutions based on additional statement coverage among remaining test cases. Besides, a sorting-based local search mechanism is proposed to further accelerate the convergence speed of the algorithm. Experimental results on different benchmark problems, and a real-world application, have shown that the proposed framework can outperform several state-of-the-art methods, in terms of solution quality and search efficiency.