CRII: SHF: Regression Testing for Projects with Distributed Software Histories

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Developers practice regression testing -- running tests against eachproject commit -- to check that project changes do not break anyfunctionality. While important, regression testing is expensive due tothe number of tests and the number of commits. Regression testselection (RTS) techniques speed up regression testing by skipping torun tests that are not affected by recent changes, and regression testprioritization (RTP) techniques reorder tests to run failing testsfaster. Existing regression techniques analyze only two adjacentcommits, effectively assuming a linear software history. However, therevolution in version-control systems changed the shape of softwarehistories. Distributed software histories are complex graphs ofbranches and merges, which do not match the simplistic view of theexisting techniques. Although existing regression techniques can berun if a distributed software history is linearized, these techniquesunderutilize the data available in the distributed software history.To speed up regression testing, the PI proposes to design techniquesthat utilize the data available in the entire distributed softwarehistory. This project proposes four tasks to improve RTS and RTP: (1)non-adjacent commit reuse - discover likely optimal commit to be usedin each analysis rather than always analyzing adjacent commits; (2)multi-commit analyses - design methods that analyze more than twocommits rather than always analyzing only two commits; (3)command-aware methods - specialize the methods for various commandsthat create each commit rather than be command-unaware; and (4)unified implementation and evaluation - share the implementation andresults among techniques, and evaluate the techniques on open-sourceand industrial projects. The broader impacts of improving RTS and RTPare to increase developers' productivity and reduce the resource usageduring testing phases.