Preemptive Regression Test Scheduling Strategies: A New Testing Approach to Thriving on the Volatile Service Environments

A workflow-based web service may use ultra-late binding to invoke external web services to concretize its implementation at run time. Nonetheless, such external services or the availability of recently used external services may evolve without prior notification, dynamically triggering the workflow-based service to bind to new replacement external services to continue the current execution. Any integration mismatch may cause a failure. In this paper, we propose Preemptive Regression Testing (PRT), a novel testing approach that addresses this adaptive issue. Whenever such a late-change on the service under regression test is detected, PRT preempts the currently executed regression test suite, searches for additional test cases as fixes, runs these fixes, and then resumes the execution of the regression test suite from the preemption point.