June 24, 2022
A new article titled “The effect of hoisting on variants of Hierarchical Delta Debugging”, written by Dániel Vince, Renáta Hodován, Daniella Bársony, and Ákos Kiss has been accepted into the Journal of Software: Evolution and Process.
In the paper, the input format of the automated test case minimizing Hierarchical Delta Debugging (HDD) was investigated to see which structures the algorithm was unable to reduce. Based on the findings the authors proposed to extend HDD and its variants (like coarse or recursive HDD) with a reduction method that does not prune subtrees but replaces them with compatible subtrees, called hoisting. They evaluated various combinations of pruning and hoisting on multiple test suites and found that compared to pruning only, hoisting could help to further reduce the size of test cases by 27% on average and by 80% in the best case.
While it is still in early view, the paper can already be read in the Wiley Online Library.