p-Laplacian Spectral Clustering Applied in Software Testing

Sammanfattning: Software testing plays a vital role in the software development life cycle. Having a more accurate and cost-efficient testing process is still demanded in the industry. Thus, test optimization becomes an important topic in both state of the art and state of the practice. Software testing today can be performed manually, automatically or semi-automatically. A manual test procedure is still popular for testing for instance in safety critical systems. For testing a software product manually, we need to create a set of manual test case specifications. The number of required test cases for testing a product is dependent on the product size, complexity, the company policies, etc. Moreover, generating and executing test cases manually is a time and resource consuming process. Therefore, ranking the test cases for execution can help us reduce the testing cost and also release the product faster to the market. In order to rank test cases for execution, we need to distinguish test cases from each other. In other words, the properties of each test case should be detected in advance. Requirement coverage is detected as a critical criterion for test cases optimization. In this thesis we propose an approach based on a $p$-Laplacian Spectral Clustering for detecting the traceability matrix between manual test cases and the requirements, in order to find the requirement coverage for the test cases. However, the feasibility of the proposed approach is studied by an empirical evaluation which has been performed on a railway use-case at Bombardier Transportation in Sweden. Through the experiments performed using our proposed method it was able to achieve an $F_1$-score up to $4.4\%$. Although the proposed approach under-performed for this specific problem compared to previous studies, it was possible to get some insights on what limitations $p$-Laplacian Spectral Clustering have and how it could potentially be modified for similar kind of problems.