SIGSOFT Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award: Improving Regression Testing Efficiency and Reliability via Test-Suite Transformations

AbstractAs software becomes more important and ubiquitous, high quality software also becomes crucial. We depend on software developers who write the software to also maintain and improve its quality. When developers make changes to software, they rely on continuous integration [6] and regression testing [15] to check that changes do not break existing functionality. Continuous integration (CI) automates the process of building and testing software after every change. The process of running tests on the code after every change is known as regression testing. The goal of regression testing is to allow developers to detect and fix faults early on, ideally the moment the faults are introduced. Regression testing is widely used in both industry and open source, but regression testing suffers from two main challenges: (1) regression testing is costly, and (2) regression test suites often contain flaky tests.