SRRTA: Regression Testing Acceleration via State Reuse

Jinhao Dong, Yiling Lou, Dan Hao

Abstract: Regression testing is widely recognized as an important but time-consuming process. To alleviate this cost issue, test selection, reduction, and prioritization have been widely studied, and they share the commonality that they improve regression testing by optimizing the execution of the whole test suite. In this paper, we attempt to accelerate regression testing from a totally new perspective, i.e., skipping some execution of a new program by reusing program states of an old program. Following this intuition, we propose a state-reuse based acceleration approach SRRTA, consisting of two components: state storage and loading. With the former, SRRTA collects some program states during the execution of an old version through three heuristic-based storage strategies; with the latter, SRRTA loads the stored program states with efficiency optimization strategies. Through the preliminary study on commons-math, SRRTA reduces 82.7% of the regression testing time.