{"id":{"repo_id":"uiuc","oai_identifier":"oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/129204"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/uiuc/oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/129204","repository":{"repo_id":"uiuc","name":"University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign","base_url":"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh"},"display":{"title":"Regression test prioritization for modern software","abstract":"Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2025-10-19 without embargo terms","abstract_html":"Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2025-10-19 without embargo terms","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Cheng, Runxiang"],"institution":"University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign","degree_name":"Ph.D.","degree_level":"Dissertation","degree_discipline":"Computer Science","degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Marinov, Darko","Zhang, Lingming","Xu, Tianyin","Yang, Wei"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2025,"date_issued":"2025-04-16","date_published":"2025-04-16","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:25:04Z","subjects":["Software engineering","Software testing","Regression testing","Test prioritization"],"languages":["en","eng"],"rights":["Copyright 2025 Runxiang Cheng"],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129204","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Marinov, Darko","Zhang, Lingming","Xu, Tianyin","Yang, Wei"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Cheng, Runxiang"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2025-04-16","2025-05"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["text","Thesis"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_discipline","label":"Discipline","values":["Computer Science"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_level","label":"Degree Level","values":["Dissertation"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_name","label":"Degree Name","values":["Ph.D."]},{"key":"thesis:institution_name","label":"Thesis Institution Name","values":["University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["Software engineering","Software testing","Regression testing","Test prioritization"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["en","eng"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["Copyright 2025 Runxiang Cheng"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129204"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2025-10-19 without embargo terms","The student, Runxiang Cheng, accepted the attached license on 2025-04-15 at 19:21.","The student, Runxiang Cheng, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-04-15 at 19:35.","This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-04-16 at 09:38.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #21786 on 2025-10-19 at 18:09:24","Continuous Integration (CI) is a common practice in software development for increasing code quality. CI runs regression test suite on each code change to help software developers find faults in the change. As codebase size and code change frequency have grown rapidly in modern software development, regression test suite runtime has also increased, thereby preventing timely debugging feedback to developers. Regression Test Prioritization (RTP) aims to expose faults in code change sooner by reordering tests in the test suite, so that the ones likely to fail are run earlier. Despite that RTP has been extensively studied for nearly three decades, research results of RTP are rarely put into practice. To facilitate the adoption of RTP for modern software systems, RTP must be demonstrated effective in speeding up regression fault detection in relevant and practical testing settings. Moreover, robust and efficient RTP tooling must be available for practitioners to easily apply RTP research results in popular software ecosystems. This dissertation takes a step forward in addressing these challenges via three lines of work. First, this dissertation examines key research findings from prior RTP studies on a newly-proposed dataset of long-running test suites with real test failures and up-to-date CI practices. Through extensive evaluation, this dissertation identifies the most effective and efficient RTP techniques under the impact of realistic CI issues such as flaky test failures. Second, this dissertation applies traditional RTP techniques for configuration testing, an emerging but critical testing scenario; it further proposes novel and effective RTP techniques for configuration testing. This dissertation assesses various factors that influence the effectiveness of RTP in speeding up misconfiguration detection, and provides detailed analyses and guidelines in applying RTP to configuration tests. Third, this dissertation presents pytest-ranking, a readily-usable open-source RTP tool for Python and its most popular testing framework Pytest. This dissertation realistically evaluates the efficacy of pytest-ranking, demonstrating that pytest-ranking is well integrated with Python/Pytest ecosystems, can be conveniently deployed into CI, has low overhead, and can detect faults substantially faster than baselines."]},{"key":"dc:format","label":"Dc Format","values":["application/pdf"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["Regression test prioritization for modern software"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor":["Marinov, Darko","Zhang, Lingming","Xu, Tianyin","Yang, Wei"],"dc:creator":["Cheng, Runxiang"],"dc:date":["2025-04-16","2025-05"],"dc:description":["Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2025-10-19 without embargo terms","The student, Runxiang Cheng, accepted the attached license on 2025-04-15 at 19:21.","The student, Runxiang Cheng, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-04-15 at 19:35.","This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-04-16 at 09:38.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #21786 on 2025-10-19 at 18:09:24","Continuous Integration (CI) is a common practice in software development for increasing code quality. CI runs regression test suite on each code change to help software developers find faults in the change. As codebase size and code change frequency have grown rapidly in modern software development, regression test suite runtime has also increased, thereby preventing timely debugging feedback to developers. Regression Test Prioritization (RTP) aims to expose faults in code change sooner by reordering tests in the test suite, so that the ones likely to fail are run earlier. Despite that RTP has been extensively studied for nearly three decades, research results of RTP are rarely put into practice. To facilitate the adoption of RTP for modern software systems, RTP must be demonstrated effective in speeding up regression fault detection in relevant and practical testing settings. Moreover, robust and efficient RTP tooling must be available for practitioners to easily apply RTP research results in popular software ecosystems. This dissertation takes a step forward in addressing these challenges via three lines of work. First, this dissertation examines key research findings from prior RTP studies on a newly-proposed dataset of long-running test suites with real test failures and up-to-date CI practices. Through extensive evaluation, this dissertation identifies the most effective and efficient RTP techniques under the impact of realistic CI issues such as flaky test failures. Second, this dissertation applies traditional RTP techniques for configuration testing, an emerging but critical testing scenario; it further proposes novel and effective RTP techniques for configuration testing. This dissertation assesses various factors that influence the effectiveness of RTP in speeding up misconfiguration detection, and provides detailed analyses and guidelines in applying RTP to configuration tests. Third, this dissertation presents pytest-ranking, a readily-usable open-source RTP tool for Python and its most popular testing framework Pytest. This dissertation realistically evaluates the efficacy of pytest-ranking, demonstrating that pytest-ranking is well integrated with Python/Pytest ecosystems, can be conveniently deployed into CI, has low overhead, and can detect faults substantially faster than baselines."],"dc:format":["application/pdf"],"dc:identifier":["https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129204"],"dc:language":["en","eng"],"dc:rights":["Copyright 2025 Runxiang Cheng"],"dc:subject":["Software engineering","Software testing","Regression testing","Test prioritization"],"dc:title":["Regression test prioritization for modern software"],"dc:type":["text","Thesis"],"thesis:degree_discipline":["Computer Science"],"thesis:degree_level":["Dissertation"],"thesis:degree_name":["Ph.D."],"thesis:institution_name":["University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:25:04Z"}