Automated test order generation for software component integration testing

The order in which software components are tested can have a significant impact on the number of stubs required during component integration testing. This paper presents an efficient approach that applies heuristics based on a given software component test dependency graph to automatically generate a test order that requires a (near) minimal number of test stubs. Thus, the approach reduces testing effort and cost. The paper describes the proposed approach, analyses its complexity and illustrates its use. Comparison with three well known graph-based approaches, for a real-world software application, shows that only the classic Le Traon et al.'s approach and ours give an optimal number of stubs. However, experiments on randomly simulated dependency models with 100 to 10,000 components show that our approach has a significant performance advantage with a reduction in the average running time of 96.01%.