Cluster-Based Test Scheduling Strategies Using Semantic Relationships between Test Specifications

One of the challenging issues in improving the test efficiency is that of achieving a balance between testing goals and testing resources. Test execution scheduling is one way of saving time and budget, where a set of test cases are grouped and tested at the same time. To have an optimal test execution schedule, all related information of a test case (e.g. execution time, functionality to be tested, dependency and similarity with other test cases) need to be analyzed. Test scheduling problem becomes more complicated at high-level testing, such as integration testing and especially in manual testing procedure. Test specifications are generally written in natural text by humans and usually contain ambiguity and uncertainty. Therefore, analyzing a test specification demands a strong learning algorithm. In this position paper, we propose a natural language processing-based approach that, given test specifications at the integration level, allows automatic detection of test cases semantic dependencies. The proposed approach utilizes the Doc2Vec algorithm and converts each test case into a vector in n-dimensional space. These vectors are then grouped using the HDBSCAN clustering algorithm into semantic clusters. Finally, a set of cluster-based test scheduling strategies are proposed for execution. The proposed approach has been applied in a sub-system from the railway domain by analyzing an ongoing testing project at Bombardier Transportation AB, Sweden.