An empirical study of regression test application frequency

Regression testing is an expensive maintenance process used to revalidate modified software. Regression test selection (RTS) techniques try to lower the cost of regression testing by selecting and running a subset of the existing test cases. Many such techniques have been proposed and initial studies show that they can produce savings. We believe, however, that issues such as the frequency with which testing is done have a strong effect on the behavior of these techniques. Therefore, we conducted an experiment to assess the effects of test application frequency on the costs and benefits of regression test selection techniques. Our results expose essential tradeoffs that should be considered when using these techniques over a series of software releases.