Towards an approach and framework for test-execution plan derivation

In industrial test and maintenance projects, test execution plans are important for performing test cycle in a time constrained manner with the objective, of delivering the expected quality by effective utilization of resources. To take advantage of the inherent parallelism in test suites, multiple resources are often deployed to test an application. The resource allocation is however driven more by costs and risks and does not exploit the parallelism. Test execution plans are often static in nature and are not well equipped to handle dynamically occurring events like abends, and changes in resource availability and test requirements. Derivation of test plans is a cumbersome activity, as it also needs to take into account test execution order, violation of which may result in unexpected failures. In this paper, we describe an approach to derive a test execution plan to facilitate parallel execution, given resource availability and test case dependencies. The execution plan provides workload distribution and scheduling of the test cases in a test suite. The case studies on test projects have shown that the derived test plans can contribute significantly towards improving the test execution cycles of the test suites.