Test Case Prioritization for Service-Oriented Workflow Applications: A Perspective of Modification Impact Analysis

Test case prioritization is a method to prioritize test cases to improve the testing efficiency of service-oriented workflow applications. Existing prioritization methods prioritize test cases in different application environments according to different metrics (for example, statement coverage, and path coverage). Web services are orchestrated by service-oriented workflow applications to provide different functions, especially in cloud-based mobile systems. As a result, those applications need more precise scheduling to run test cases that can detect faults earlier. Unfortunately, most regression test case prioritization studies in service-oriented workflow applications neglect the use of activity dependency, which is an important factor that affects test case prioritization. By analyzing the dependences between activities, the modification effects of activities on the modified version of service-oriented workflow applications are calculated. On this basis, this paper proposes a new prioritization method for regression test cases. Experimental results show that our method is more effective than the traditional coverage-based technique in testing case priority.