Multi-objective approaches to optimal testing resource allocation in modular software systems

Software testing is an important issue in software engineering. As software systems become increasingly large and complex, the problem of how to optimally allocate the limited testing resource during the testing phase has become more important, and difficult. Traditional Optimal Testing Resource Allocation Problems (OTRAPs) involve seeking an optimal allocation of a limited amount of testing resource to a number of activities with respect to some objectives (e.g., reliability, or cost). We suggest solving OTRAPs with Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs). Specifically, we formulate OTRAPs as two types of multi-objective problems. First, we consider the reliability of the system and the testing cost as two objectives. Second, the total testing resource consumed is also taken into account as the third objective. The advantages of MOEAs over state-of-the-art single objective approaches to OTRAPs will be shown through empirical studies. Our study has revealed that a well-known MOEA, namely Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II), performs well on the first problem formulation, but fails on the second one. Hence, a Harmonic Distance Based Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (HaD-MOEA) is proposed and evaluated in this paper. Comprehensive experimental studies on both parallel-series, and star-structure modular software systems have shown the superiority of HaD-MOEA over NSGA-II for OTRAPs. © 2006 IEEE.