A Heuristic Approach to Break Cycles for the Class Integration Test Order Generation

It is a general objective to minimize overall stubbing cost when performing class integration test order generation. Existing approaches are unable to obtain a cost-optimal class test order, this is largely due to the lack of a comprehensive analysis on the factors that affect overall stubbing cost, i.e., the number of required test stubs and the corresponding stubbing complexity. To address this issue, we propose an approach called HBCITO (Heuristic approach to Break Cycles for the class Integration Test Order generation). Given a set of removed dependencies, a heuristic algorithm is employed to search for a near ideal set of class dependencies. Such dependencies break the same or greater number of cycles as the initialized dependencies but attract less stubbing cost. The experimental results show that HBCITO is capable of generating class test orders with significantly lower stubbing cost compared with other approaches.