A hierarchical test case prioritization technique for object oriented software

Software reuse is the use of existing artifacts to create new software. Inheritance is the foremost technique of reuse. But the inherent complexity due to inheritance hierarchy found in object - oriented paradigm also affect testing. Every time any change occurs in the software, new test cases are added in addition to the existing test suite. So there is need to conduct effective regression testing having less number of test cases to reduce cost and time. In this paper a hierarchical test case prioritization technique is proposed wherein various factors have been considered that affect error propagation in the inheritance. In this paper prioritization of test cases take place at two levels. In the first level the classes are prioritized and in the second level the test cases of prioritized classes are ordered. To show the effectiveness of proposed technique it was applied and analyze on a C++ program.