An Enhanced Artificial Bee Colony: Naïve Bayes Technique for Optimizing Software Testing

Software driven technology has become a part of life and the quality of software largely depends on the extent of effective testing performed during various phases of development. A wide range of nature inspired searching techniques are employed over years to automate the testing process and provide promising solutions to elude the infeasibility of exhaustive testing. These techniques use metaheuristics and work by converting the problem space into search space. A subset of optimized solutions is searched that reduces overall time by shortening the testing time. Objective: An enhanced Artificial Bee Colony- Naive Bayes optimizer for test case selection is proposed in this paper. This article also aims to provide brief insights into the emergence of hybrid swarm-inspired techniques over the last two decades. Method: The modified Artificial Bee colony is applied after component selection and further optimization is achieved using Naive Bayes classifier. The proposed technique is implemented and evaluated taking three benchmark programs into consideration. The proposed technique is also compared to other competitive swarm intelligence-based techniques of its class. Results: The experimental results show that the proposed technique outperforms other swarm-inspired techniques in terms of execution time in a given scenario and capable of higher detection of faults with minimal test case selection. Conclusion: The proposed approach is an improvement over existing techniques and helps in huge time and cost saving. It will contribute to the testing society and enhance the overall quality of the software.