A tester-assisted methodology for test redundancy detection

Test redundancy detection reduces test maintenance costs and also ensures the integrity of test suites. One of the most widely used approaches for this purpose is based on coverage information. In a recent work, we have shown that although this information can be useful in detecting redundant tests, it may suffer from large number of false-positive errors, that is, a test case being identified as redundant while it is really not. In this paper, we propose a semiautomated methodology to derive a reduced test suite from a given test suite, while keeping the fault detection effectiveness unchanged. To evaluate the methodology, we apply the mutation analysis technique to measure the fault detection effectiveness of the reduced test suite of a real Java project. The results confirm that the proposed manual interactive inspection process leads to a reduced test suite with the same fault detection ability as the original test suite.