Test case prioritization for model transformations

The application of model transformations is a critical component in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). To ensure the correctness of the generated models, these model transformations need to be extensively tested. However, during the regression testing of these model transformations, it becomes too costly to frequently run a large number of test cases. Test case prioritization techniques are needed to rank the test cases and help the tester during the regression testing to be more efficient. The objective is to rank the fault revealing test cases higher so that a tester can only execute the top ranked test cases and still be able to detect as many faults as possible in the case of limited budget and resources. The aim of this paper is to present a test prioritization approach for the regression testing of model transformations. The approach is based on exploiting the rule coverage information of the test cases. The paper presents an empirical study which compares several techniques introduced by our approach for prioritizing test cases. The approach is complemented with a tool that implements the proposed techniques and can automatically generate test case orderings.