Test Case Prioritization based on analysis of program structure

Test case prioritization techniques have been empirically proved to be effective in improving the rate of fault detec-tion in regression testing. However, most of previous tech-niques assume that all the faults have equal severity, which dose not meet the practice. In addition, because most of the existing techniques rely on the information gained from pre-vious execution of test cases or source code changes, few of them can be directly applied to non-regression testing. In this paper, aiming to improve the rate of severe faults de-tection for both regression testing and non-regression test-ing, we propose a novel test case prioritization approach based on the analysis of program structure. The key idea of our approach is the evaluation of testing-importance for each module (e.g., method) covered by test cases. As a proof of concept, we implement Apros, a test case prior-itization tool, and perform an empirical study on two real, non-trivial Java programs. The experimental result repre-sents that our approach could be a promising solution to improve the rate of severe faults detection. 1