Determining Integration and Test Orders in the Presence of Modularization Restrictions

The Integration and Test Order problem is very known in the software testing area. It is related to the determination of a test order of modules that minimizes stub creation effort, and consequently testing costs. A solution approach based on Multi-Objective and Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) achieved promising results, since these algorithms allow the use of different factors and measures that can affect the stubbing process, such as number of attributes and operations to be simulated by the stub. However, works based on such approach do not consider different modularization restrictions related to the software development environment. For example, the fact that some modules can be grouped into clusters to be developed and tested by independent teams. This is a very common practice in most organizations, particularly in that ones that adopt a distributed development process. Considering this fact, this paper introduces an evolutionary and multi-objective strategy to deal with such restrictions. The strategy was implemented and evaluated with real systems and three MOEAs. The results are analysed in order to compare the algorithms performance, and to better understand the problem in the presence of modularization restrictions. We observe an impact in the costs and a more complex search, when restrictions are considered. The obtained solutions are very useful and the strategy is applicable in practice.