In software testing, test case generation is an important activity to ensure software quality. Various test case generation techniques are being provided for high reliable software systems. It becomes critical to execute all the test cases in certain time period. In order to reduce the number of test cases, test suite reduction techniques with respect to some coverage criteria are used. This paper provides the significance of classification tree method and combined classification tree method over equivalence class partition method for test case generation. This paper presents a comparison of these test case generation methods to show that which method has good potential to use for test suite reduction.

1. Ammann, P. E., and Black, P. E. 2001. A specification-based coverage metric to evaluate test sets. International Journal of Reliability, Quality and Safety Engineering. 8, 4 (Dec. 2001), 275-300.
2. Binder. R. V. 1996. Testing object-oriented software: a survey. Software Testing Verification and Reliability, 6, 3/4, 125 – 252.
3. Chen, T. Y., and Lau, M. F. 1998. A simulation study on some heuristics for test suite reduction. Information and Software Technology. 40, 13, 777-787.
4. Chen,T.Y., and Poon, P.L.1997. Construction of classification trees via the classification-hierarchical table. Information and Software Technology. 39, 13, 889-896.
5. Grochtmann. M., and Grimm. K. 1993. Classification trees for partition testing. Verification and Reliability,3, 2, 63-82.
6. Harrold, M. J., Gupta, R., and Soffa, M. L. 1993. A methodology for controlling the size of a test suite. ACM Transactionson Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)2, 3(July 1993).
7. Hennessy, M., and Power, J. F. 2005. An analysis of rule coverage as a criterion in generating minimal test suites for grammar based software. In Proceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM International Conference onAutomated Software Engineering (ASE’05), (Long Beach, CA, USA, Nov. 2005), 104–113.
8. Leung, H., and Prema, P. 2003. Testing COTS with classification tree method. In Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications (L.A., Nov. 2003). SEA 2003, 270-276.
9. Kichigin, D. 2010. A Method for Test Suite Reduction for Regression Testing of Interactions between Software Modules. LNCS, Springer – verlag, 2010, 177-184.
10. Mathur. A. P. 2008. Foundations of Software Testing: Fundamental Algorithms and Techniques. Pearson Education.
11. Myers. G. J. 1979. The Art of Software Testing. John Wiley & Sons, New York.
12. McMaster, S., and Memon, A.2005. Call stacks coverage for test suite reduction. In Proceedings of 21st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance.539-548.
13. Ramadoss, B., and Prema, P. 2009. An approach for merging two classification trees. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Advance Computing Conference (Patiala, Punjab), 1829 – 1834.
14. Rothermel, G., Harrold, M. J., Ostrin, J. and Hong, C. 1998. An empirical study of the effects of minimization on the fault detection capabilities of test suites. Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, (Nov. 1998) 34-43.
15. Rothermel, G., Harrold, M. J., Von Ronne, J., and Hong, C. 2002. Empirical studies of test-suite reduction. Journal of Software Testing, Verification and Reliability. 12, 4. DOI = 10.1002/stvr.256.
16. Wong, W. E., Horgan, J. R., Mathur, A. P., and Pasquini, A. 1997. Test set size minimization and fault detection effectiveness: A case study in a space application. Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference. 522-528.
17. Wong, W. E., Horgan, J. R., London, S., Mathur, A. P. 1995. Effect of test set minimization on fault detection effectiveness. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Software Engineering. (Washington, 1995), 41-50.
18. Samuel, P., and Mall, R. ( 2008). A novel test case design technique using dynamic slicing of UML sequence diagrams. E-Informatica Software Engineering Journal. 2, 1 (2008).
19. Selva Kumar, S., and N. Ramarai. (2011). Regression test suite minimization using dynamic interaction patterns with improved FDE. European Journal of Scientific Research, 49, 3 (2011), 332-353.
20. Zhong, H., Zhang. L., and Mei, H. 2006. An experimental comparison of four test suite reduction techniques, ICSE 2006, ACM, 636-639.

Classification tree method Equivalence class partition method Combined classification tree method Coverage criteria Test case generation Test Suite Reduction