Abstract
During software development, test cases are continuously generated to exercise new functionality or to maintain test adequacy. Thus, the sizes of test suites may grow significantly over time. Due to time and resource constraints, it is necessary to remove the redundant test cases through test suite minimization techniques. A potential drawback of these techniques is that minimizing a test suite might reduce its ability to reveal faults. Prior work has shown that test suite minimization techniques can severely compromise the fault detection effectiveness of test suites. In the literatures, some works were dedicated to improving the fault detection effectiveness retention of reduced test suites. However, most of them affect some extent of suite size reduction. In this thesis, we present a novel approach for test suite reduction that uses additional testing criterion to break the ties in the minimization process. We integrated the proposed approach with two existing algorithms and conducted experiments for evaluation. The experiment results show that, compared to existing approaches, the proposed approach can improve the fault detection effectiveness of reduced suites with negligible increase in the size of the suites. Besides, under specific condition, the proposed approach can also accelerate the process of minimization.