Mechanism for identification of duplicate test cases

Selection of distinct test cases and elimination of duplicates are two major problems in software testing life cycle. In order to solve these and make the testing cost effective, a set of test case comparison metrics algorithms is introduced which will quantitatively calculate the difference between any arbitrary test case pair of an existing test suite. Metric values for test case pair are generated and combined to create one or more unique signature values. Using these signature values a cluster of similar test cases are generated, that can effectively test under time constraints.